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How Do Bounties Work?

Bounties let you invite criticism and reward high-quality contributions with real money.

Starting December 23, 2025, select users can run bounties. Anyone can participate.

Bounties are in beta. Expect things to break.

How do I participate?

First, log in or sign up.

Next, browse the list of bounties. Click a bounty’s dollar amount to view its page, review the bountied idea and the terms, and submit a criticism on that idea.

That’s it – you’re in.

How do I get paid?

Each bounty enters a review period roughly five days after it starts (the exact date is shown on the bounty page). The review period lasts 24 hours. During this time, the bounty owner reviews submissions and rejects only those that don’t meet the stated terms.

To be eligible for a payout, all of the following must be true:

1. Your submission is a direct criticism of the bountied idea.
2. Your submission has no pending criticisms when the review period begins.
3. Your submission meets the bounty terms and the site-wide terms.
4. You have a connected Stripe account in good standing before the review period begins, and it remains connected through the end of the review period.

The bounty owner is never eligible to receive payouts from their own bounty.

How much will I get paid?

The bounty amount is prorated among all eligible submissions.

For example, if there are ten eligible criticisms and you contributed two of them, you receive 20% of the bounty.

Fractions of cents are not paid out. Amounts below USD 0.50 are not paid out.

How do I run a bounty?

Click the megaphone button next to an idea (near bookmark, archive, etc.).

Set a bounty amount and write clear terms describing the kinds of criticisms you’re willing to pay for. Then enter your credit card details to authorize the amount plus a 5% bounty fee.

Your card is authorized, not charged, when the bounty starts.

The bounty typically runs for five to seven days, depending on your card’s authorization window. After around five days, a 24-hour review period begins. During this time, review submissions and reject those that don’t meet your terms. Submissions you don’t reject are automatically accepted at the end of the review period and become eligible for payout.

If no eligible criticisms are accepted, your card is never charged.

Start a bounty today. Terms apply.

Just as nations can have different forms of governance, minds can too.

For example: Most probably have that CEO-sense of self.

• Some minds with lots of coercive memes are more like dictatorships.

• People with "smaller egos" (less anti-rational memes) are more like libertarian societies.

• But people with set preferences for less self are more like communist societies. That's a kind of coerced decentralisation.

Split personalities would be akin to a highly polarised society that switches governance back and forth.

Cool, would you say then that it is only in empirical fields we can deduce facts/truth?

If so: In what way is this different from Wittgenstein saying we can't reach any truths in philosophy (which makes it meaningless)?

If … the mind is a decentralized system, does the mind have something like a price system for its different parts to communicate?

But the mind isn’t a decentralized system. It has a central ‘I’ sitting at the top. So it’s more like a company with a CEO than a fully decentralized system.

Hayek was a terrible writer. Convoluted, hard to understand.

For example, as quoted by Twitter account F. A. Hayek Quotes:

The more a man indulges in the propensity to blame others or circumstances for his failures, the more disgruntled and ineffective he tends to become.

He could have just said ‘blaming others makes you unhappy and weak’. But he chose complicated language, presumably to impress people.

Makes me think he didn’t have much of substance to say.

He was also sloppy at quoting: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/investigating-hayek-s-misquotes

In our book club today, @erik-orrje raised the issue of split personalities.

I’m wildly speculating here, but I wonder if split personalities could be the result of the price mechanism inside a mind being broken.

If the price mechanism is needed for different parts of the mind to communicate with each other, and this mechanism breaks down somehow, then the parts become isolated.

Hayek writes:

[P]rices can act to coördinate [sic] the separate actions of different people in the same way as subjective values help the individual to coördinate the parts of his plan.

Hayek argues that any one man always knows very little about the economy as a whole. But the price system will tell him the little he does need to know.

I wonder how far the similarities between the economy and a single mind go. If the price system is a way for parts of a decentralized system to communicate, and the mind is a decentralized system, does the mind have something like a price system for its different parts to communicate?

A mind is vast, full of ideas. Any part of it always knows very little about the rest. In this sense, ideas in a mind are like men in an economy. So how do these ideas coordinate efficiently? Do emotions act like a price system inside the mind? Ayn Rand writes:

Emotions are the automatic results of man's value judgments integrated by his subconscious; emotions are estimates of that which furthers man's values or threatens them, that which is for him or against him—lightning calculators giving him the sum of his profit or loss.

The fun criterion is surely relevant in this context, too. Hayek writes that a rational economic order is about “conveying to the individuals such additional knowledge as they need in order to enable them to fit their plans with those of others.” That sounds like common-preference finding, which essentially works the same across minds as it does within a single mind.

Are prices inside the mind involved in finding common preferences?

Original article: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/hayek-s-the-use-of-knowledge-in-society-simp

Mirror: https://hackethal.substack.com/publish/post/182216063

In a future iteration, the user could additionally set a per-criticism ceiling. Which the site would recommend setting when using permissive terms.

This way, the user could set a total budget of $200, say, while capping each criticism at $30, for example. The first 6 eligible criticisms would each get $30, and the next one would get $20. The remaining criticisms would get nothing.

This approach effectively merges #3474 and #3472, giving users maximum flexibility to choose the best outcome depending on what kinds of criticism they anticipate getting based on their terms.

Let’s say somebody starts a bounty with permissive terms, asking for virtually any kind of criticism. They set a high ceiling, hoping for many submissions. $200, say.

If they only end up getting one or two small criticisms, for typos, say, they won’t like having to pay 100 bucks a pop.

In other words, the few criticisms you end up getting may not be worth the ceiling.

I don’t think so, no.

The BoI chapter 1 glossary defines empiricism as “The misconception that we ‘derive’ all our knowledge from sensory experience.” I’m not saying empirical fields derive knowledge from sensory experience.

There’s a difference between ‘empiricism’ and ‘empirical’.

I see, interesting. If only empirical fields can correspond to facts/truth, isn't that a form of empiricism?

This approach is more complex for the bounty initiator than just indicating a total amount they are willing to spend (#3474). It’s best not to require users to do math.

Given the need for a deadline, all critics get paid at the same time anyway.

There could be a UI component showing estimated payout based on current number of criticisms, with a warning that actual payout could be less.

Then it’s less clear to contributors how much money they can expect.

Could pay out to only first x criticisms, where x is small enough the payout for each criticism is high enough to cover transaction costs (and then some).

I can roll out the feature to a few trusted users. Then I can reevaluate later with more experience to judge actual risks rather than speculate ahead of time.