I was thinking that you could just post comments, since you'd have to manually track your "comment score" and there wouldn't be any flashy green trophy symbol accompanying it (unless you yourself went there, like you went through the trouble of inventing a browser widget that would display a success marker when it recorded comment upvotes or something). But if you still wanted to use the site to collate academic information about the local topic, you could post links in the comments; but then this would veer towards "answering questions in the comments."
So that would typically be discouraged, but is it discouraged more for lower-score users, to nudge them towards gaining score and getting an "addicted" feeling about this social media network? But once you pass into an upper "score bracket," the payoff might seem less per upvote. (I mean, some people might feel less energized by an upvote "later on," than others, whereas some other people could be more "in the moment" and always get excited about any upvote at all.) You do get a freer range of bounties you can place on questions, though. Like, if you are interested in multiple questions (over time, or at once, or whenever), and you have 7,500 score, you could sacrifice 1,500 points to put a maximum bounty on three of-interest questions, etc. And if you were using the site for its intended purpose, i.e. to get outside help in resolving questions, with a consistent acknowledgement of your lack of expertise in various matters, then you would have a consistent motive in using the bounty function. So all things considered, it might not be that the upvoting system is meant to get people "addicted" to the network, at least not in the sense of getting "addicted" to getting upvotes (and seeing the green trophy symbol, etc.).
So is that the intended way to use the site non-competitively: to build score for use in bounties? Hardly anything about the site's overt presentation nudges people in the direction of using the bounty function that often.Y Is there a special prompt to apply a bounty to a question, like there's a prompt, say, for when you post an answer to a question of your own? (I have a dim memory of the site, once upon a time, tracking a question as having a lot of upvotes and/or answers that hadn't been accepted yet, so that there was some kind of prompt about resolving the issue, but I don't know if I'm remembering something that clearly happened in the first place, neither whether the supposed prompt was to place a bounty on the question to encourage its resolution.) And it's quite prohibitive to have the bounty points totally evaporate into oblivion if they time out, especially if the questions that most perplex you are difficult for other users to engage with. Also, sometimes the users who are in the best position to get the bounty points are the ones who've consistently used the site appropriately for a long time and therefore already have a massive score, because they have consistently provided academic references/peer-reviewed reasoning throughout their SE careers. (You see this even in what might seem like an a priori domain of inquiry, the Mathematics SE and Overflow: a willingness to reference established materials with appropriate qualifications. Hell, they even do this a lot on the WorldbuildingSE. And even here on the PhilosophySE, most of the higher-score contributors are predominantly reference-based in their questions/answers.) So even if the bounty function blocks a competitivist mindset from dominating SE usage on one level, does it feed into a system of "emotional currency" that stratifies competitively into dominant classes? In this case, the "upper class" of high-score contributors.
YI hardly ever vividly remember that there even is a bounty function. I've used it multiple times, and I've aimed for the larger-score payouts, but I could probably have done better to use it more often (even at the higher rate).
