Would awarding a bounty in order for the other user to get some particular privilege be considered a misuse of bounty system?

Question

I suppose the title says it, but to give a more detailed explanation: Suppose that some user does not have certain privilege and for some reason I want that user to have this privilege. If the user has at least one answer, I can give him part of my reputation using a bounty. Would such thing be considered a misuse of bounty system? Is such behavior frowned upon?

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At least one not entirely hypothetical situation where I can imagine something like this, is the privilege to use the chat. Since this was discussed before, I am probably not the only one who sees that in some situation there is a problem with the threshold for participating in chat:

• Avoiding extended discussion in comments section with low rep user?
• Allow inviting people with rep < 20 to private chat?

I can imagine two extreme situations: There is a new user, you are trying to help them with their first question. That's the reason why you exchange plenty of comments. And maybe the discussion in a chatroom would be more efficient way to do this. Another situation (this one is entirely hypothetical): Suppose an expert from an area you are interested in has posted an answer here. But they do not seem to be much interested in participation on MSE. (They did made any other post here.) As the answer has been upvoted only by you, the expert does not have sufficient reputation to enter the chat. And you want discuss something which is better suited for chat than for main. (If not for other reason, then for the reason that long exchanges in comments are not recommended on SE.)

Of course, it is possible that situation when you want to grant in some way a privilege to another user can arise in connection with other privileges, not only with talking in chat. (Although I cannot think of something like that at the moment.)

Answer 1

Bounties are meant to either draw attention to a question and reward a user that puts a lot of effort into answering the question, or to reward a great answer that was already posted. Like votes they should be focused on posts, not on users. Reputation and the privileges associated with it should be earned by participating on the site, not just gifted by another user. The privilege progression is also meant to ensure that users have enough time to learn about the site before they get to use the more powerful privileges and tools.

A large-scale reputation transfer is certainly a misuse of the bounty system and might even be reversed by SE employees.

There's another aspect to this, and that is that users committing vote fraud sometimes use bounties to transfer reputation between their sock puppets. If you create a suspicious-looking bounty that draws the attention of the moderators, they'll look closely at all involved accounts to detect if they are indeed controlled by one person.

That said, moderators cannot read your mind and can only indirectly determine the intent behind a bounty. If you award a bounty to a very good answer, the intent behind your bounty doesn't really matter all that much. If you award a bounty to a mediocre or bad answer, that is rather problematic and likely to draw negative attention.