One of the first things I did upon joining this site today was to go through the unanswered section (hoping I'd be able to answer one). I didn't end up finding one I felt I could answer, but I did find a great question. So I bountied it - it very quickly got an answer which deserves the bounty (I'm holding it a bit longer in the hopes of more participation).
What's to stop some of the other higher rep users adopting a question they like and offering a bounty?
Right now, lack of reputation. One of the metrics used to determine the health of a site in beta is the number of users projected to meet certain reputation benchmarks:
As you can see from our report card, we're behind. In fact, there are only 2 people with 2000+ reputation, and only 8 people with 1,000+ reputation (the minimum needed to edit in beta: it goes up to 2,000 out of beta).
So high rep users offering bounties doesn't solve the long term problem (even though it's very nice of you to do so): the long term solution is vote early, vote often. Too many questions and answers here don't get upvotes or even accepted answers, making it hard to get more people with more community moderation privileges.
