What are Replit Bounties?
replit bounties are when you can post a “bounty” that is, you can ask someone to do something, and pay them to create it.
It sounds like a good idea, right?
In theory, it’s great, a good way to literally pay the best of best 
Pros
This is, as I said, an amazing way to help encourage the best of the best. I can name a few:
- Ray
- Bookie
- Vulcan
- not-ethan
and it has happened as these people have picked up a lot of bounties (9k cycles worth for not-ethan, or about 1k cycles per bounty).
In addition, it brings more people, not just creators but also entrepreneurs and thinkers!
Flaws
now for the … flaws. While on paper, this is working, but it’s working a little too well…
Here’s what I mean:
replit has made it so that people will heavily favor only those who have already completed many bounties or are famous creators. This fuels the “vicious cycle of poverty.” This theory, or well, phenomena, really, states that those who are poor will stay so because they are poor and unable to gain more skills due to trying to survive, and those who are rich have the time and money to grow in skill and in monetary value. While, of course this is not a hard and fast rule, it is what often happens, as mostly those who get accepted are famous, and those who are rejected are newer programmers.
Normal complaints
normally, people complain that bounties discourage newer programmers, but I actually disagree, bounties are for experienced programmers, and if you are rejected, in theory, it should be because you don’t have a good enough resume (as I talked about, this is not always the case but most of the time people complain about this and actually don’t have a good resume).
Problem with bounty hunters
most of the time, the bounty applications are literally clogged with cocky, all-knowing, one sentence goers who will write something to the effect of: “I am literally the most amazing programmer to grace this earth, and I know everything. Don’t think about any achievements, I’m too good for those.” So yeah.
Problem with setters
In theory, it should be a diverse ecosystem of many types of people, but in reality it’s just web dev and ML which is literally it. In addition, replit does not help by making those like the only bounty templates. Next, replit also tries to normalize using … hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a platform you just joined because the note that is the “normal” amount of money excepted. However, I’m sure most people would be really happy with 20 dollars to do a hard ML project because a lot of people don’t do bounties for money because why would you, that’s kinda of dull, instead they do it for a combination of it as well as gaining experience doing professional freelancing and training in these topics. And, because replit has normalized 1k dollar bounties, they also normalize 1k dollar freelance work, which would be a team of pro freelancers with company level specs, special access to AI models, and EA to openAI, etc. However, they will not receive this, and therefore almost everyone posting lets thousands of dollars lay latent and unused. This seems like, but I’m not sure, a ploy to make people pay for 1k dollars, but not actually use it.
Well sorry this is kind of a rant but yeah. If there’s anything rambly, I did not edit it please, tell me anything!
EDIT: I forgot the fact that people will beef up their bounty competition count by creating alts and that the cycle cap is completely broken and easily bypassed
