Is it possible to stop bounty from being automatically awarded?

Question

Got this notification when I signed in this morning:

The logic seems faulty to me, but maybe someone can explain it. Basically I have a bounty question where Ramesh answered after the bounty was posted. The answer doesn't resolve the issue though so it seems wrong to award a bounty automatically just because someone posted some kind of answer.

Ramesh's answers are usually high quality and it's not like I would get the bounty back anyways, so even if it does auto-reward to him this one time, I'm not too concerned about it. I'm just wondering what kind of incentives this creates going forward. I could see if I had upvoted or accepted as the answer but this seems like it's only in response to something having been posted.

There doesn't seem to be an obvious way to stop the bounty from going to any answerer.

Answer 1

I see the below information from here:

If you do not award your bounty within 7 days (plus the grace period), the highest voted answer created after the bounty started with a minimum score of 2 will be awarded half the bounty amount. If two or more eligible answers have the same score (i.e., their scores are tied), the oldest answer is awarded the bounty. If there's no answer meeting those criteria, the bounty is not awarded to anyone.

So as per my understanding, the bounty will go to the community and it will not be awarded to some answer that doesn't answer the question. But the bounty points deducted from your reputation will not be rewarded back.

Answer 2

There used to be a method to throw away the bounty: create your own answer, and award the bounty to yourself. The points will be lost.

See https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/54999/135695

However, this much-loved feature was apparently taken away, see https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/97802/135695

These discussions are also relevant:

• Explicit “do not award bounty” button
• Do not implicitly award bounty to an answer that has been downvoted by the investor