After receiving the Tumbleweed badge for one of my questions, I started looking into when it is appropriate to place a bounty on a question.

Some relevant information about the Tumbleweed badge:

According to this answer, the Tumbleweed badge does not seem to serve much of a purpose.


And bounties:

The bounty help page gives a few pointers on when it is appropriate to place a bounty on a question.


I am a bit torn between deciding whether or not earning the Tumbleweed badge warrants me placing a bounty on my question. After all, the bounty help page states

If you've asked a good question

then, among having also met other criteria, it can be appropriate to add a bounty to the question. Of course, the Tumbleweed badge indicates that the question has not been shown to be good or bad by the community standards, as no one has voted on it yet.

So, I have a question that has had its status and progress updated at least once but has not received as much attention as I would hope for. With all of the above in mind, would a post earning the Tumbleweed badge warrant a user placing a bounty on the post?

My intuition here is that the answer is no, because the Tumbleweed badge is not indicative of a question displaying enough criteria for placing a bounty.

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    Or you can ask a question here on meta, and surf all the eyeballs drawn by the "meta effect"... :-) – alexis Jun 7 '16 at 21:11
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    Tumbleweed and bounties: The two are pretty much unrelated and can safely be considered independently from each other. – Jean-François Corbett Jun 8 '16 at 13:40

You're right - the Tumbleweed badge doesn't indicate if it is a good question or not. It's not a bad question - most bad questions get downvoted rather quickly. It just means most people aren't interested in the topic. A bounty is one way to increase people's interest in your question. From the help center:

if ... you feel a particular question still isn't getting enough attention, adding a bounty may help.

Ultimately, it is your reputation which is used for the bounty, and you decide what to do with it. I've seen a lot of worse questions with a bounty on them.

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    A little more reading would have done me a lot of good. That excerpt from the help center is about as close to what I was looking for as I will get, I imagine. In this particular case, the Tumbleweed badge reinforced my thinking that the question has not received enough attention. Now I will get to try out adding bounties! – buratino Jun 7 '16 at 13:19
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    Alternatively, post a Meta question that gets into the Hot list ;) – OrangeDog Jun 7 '16 at 20:37
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    @OrangeDog, no kidding; I've already received 8x the amount of views on the referenced post since asking this question 9 hours ago than I had seen all of last week (and, more importantly, suggestions which have helped develop the question). What an amazing side effect. – buratino Jun 7 '16 at 22:25
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    Some tumbleweed questions are just very hard to answer. They might contain a question that very few know the answer to because it is a such a narrow topic. Bad questions just gets downvoted quickly. Then you get a "peer pressure" badge instead if you remove it. – Ola Jun 9 '16 at 21:57

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