I just read Brent Ozar’s post about Stack Overflow adding a “reputation bounty” for answering questions. Brent said:
Thank God they’re not using real money, only reputation scores. If they used real money, I’d probably stay up all night hitting refresh, waiting for new questions to come in.
Real money might not be such a bad idea. They could tie in to something like tipjoy and when people thought an answer was helpful, they could tip a small amount (maybe enough to buy the person lunch). I could see someone willing to toss out $100 or more, if they were under a deadline and working with a somewhat obscure technology. The biggest problems I see would be measuring the quality of the answer and collecting payment. It could be run similar to 99designs.
