How should challenge authors be rewarded for creating exemplary challenges?

Question

Over on Puzzling.SE, the community there has been discussing various ways to reward puzzle authors for creating exemplary puzzles. Given that we're like Puzzling.SE in that we're not a Q&A site, and that we've discussed increasing reputation gain/loss for challenge upvotes and downvotes, it seems fitting that some of the ideas discussed over at Puzzling.SE might also work well for our site.

The Problem

Creating a good challenge is much harder than writing a solution to a challenge. Challenges often spend several days or longer in the Sandbox, where authors receive feedback to smooth out rough edges and ensure that their challenges are as high-quality as possible. In spite of this, challenges are treated the same as questions on any other Q&A site on the network: 5 reputation added per upvote, 2 reputation subtracted per downvote, and no system to reward awesome challenges. Good solutions are rewarded much more (double the rep, with the possibility for bounties), which gives the appearance that we value solutions more than challenges (which is very false - a good challenge is just as valuable as a good solution, if not more so).

What changes could be made to reward users who create exemplary challenges (other than doubling the reputation gain/loss from votes, which is the subject of an existing feature request)?

Answer 1

I suggested a potential feature request related to this when we were discussing ideas about the fact that we're not a Q&A site. This is of course a suggestion that would require changes to the software, which would likely be only useful for PPCG and Puzzling.

The main idea is to introduce a separate bounty system for challenges. The main difference to the existing bounty system is that the 7-day deadline doesn't make much sense for challenges. Hence, I think that a challenge bounty system could work one (or both) of two ways:

• Immediate assignment of a bounty to an existing challenge, in the same vein as the normal "Reward an existing answer" bounty. Sometimes you come across a challenge that you just like so much that you want to donate the author some additional reputation. It would be nice if this also resulted in the challenge being featured for some time, so that the reputation wasn't the only benefit.
• Indefinite bounties: if you want to see a certain type of challenge that appears hard to pull off, you could offer a bounty for it. When someone posts a challenge that does this to your satisfaction, you'd award the bounty. However, I see quite a lot of problems with this. Mainly the fact that people would post their indefinite bounties, they'd never be satisfied, the user becomes inactive at some point, and then we end up with a bunch of indefinite bounties which will never be awarded and clutter the list of open bounties. Also, the fact that there's no way to ensure that a bounty is awarded for the thing it was originally offered for would become a bigger issue here.

So personally, I'd be in favour of immediate bounties for rewarding existing challenges. If someone wants to challenge others to come up with a certain type of difficult-to-do-right challenge, we could do this informally like we already do for answers.

Answer 2

Maintain a list of exemplary challenges

We would have a post on meta. In this post, each answer would consist of a summary of an exemplary challenge and a link. Each such answer would serve as a nomination, and challenges whose nominations that receive a certain number of upvotes would be considered exemplary.

This mechanism ensures that this honor is democratic, since any user can vote on meta, but also ensures that the honor is not unduly influenced by temporary factors, such as whether the challenge ends up on HNQ, since people who want to vote for the challenge as exemplary would have to go to meta to do it.

In addition to serving as a list of exemplary challenge, it would serve as a place for newer members of the site to look for interesting older challenges. In contrast to the Tour of PPCG proposal, it would be primarily for new challenges, to be added shortly after they are written. Of course, older exemplary challenges would still be welcome.

To increase exposure, this post could be featured on Meta, the way the Sandbox is, or mentioned in the help center or similar resources.

The reward for challenge authors would be the recognition by the community of their excellent challenge, in a place for everyone to see, and enjoy.

As an additional benefit, this system would require no changes to site infrastructure, so we could set it up ourselves.

Based on a suggestion of Sp3000: Once there are a lot of exemplary challenges, it might be hard to find them, or to find the new ones. Therefore, it would be good to have a standard template for nominations, and a stack snippet in the main post to generate the list of exemplary challenges with links, both in order of votes and in order of newness.

Answer 3

Trivial challenges take little time to answer, so a lot of people will answer them, which means that the challenge will frequently appear at the top of the active questions list; so, people see it, and it has a good chance of getting upvotes.
As opposed to this, a hard challenge which doesn't get any answers in the first days, "sinks" in the active challenges list; so people don't see it and it doesn't get many answers or upvotes.

The same is true for answers: answers to trivial challenges are seen more often and have a greater chance of getting upvotes than (hard) answers to hard challenges.

This is why the site gets flooded with trivial challenges, and the non-trivial ones don't get a chance to shine.

There could be a "non-trivial" tag. Or a "trivial" tag. In this way, you can filter out the trivial challenges when you want to look only at the non-trivial ones.