I was about to post my very own question. Thank you for reopening this post.

Were these questions already on the HNQ when they were bountied? Is it possible to find out?

This is weird, I saw some questions (not all) which just had their URL addresses, so I thought of fixing the links. When I clicked on "edit" all the URL addresses fixed themselves before my eyes. When I closed the post they reverted to their previous appearance: https:// name of site + string of numbers. Bug? Or my browser?

Bug: meta.stackexchange.com/q/301352/295232

If nobody posts a better answer the bounty is yours. You deserve it.

I'm going to do a small experiment. I'm going to place a bounty on a HNQ on EL&U for two days max and see what happens to it on the HNQ list. It's been on the HNQ for about 4 days now and has 7,311 views until now.

Thanks, my scraper will keep track of it. The HNQ is still rather mysterious, both in the effect it has on the community as in how it's determined.

I shall pretend to know what a scraper is, I always use one for the car windshield when the weather is icy.

Heh, almost forgot that we have a lot of non-programmers here :) It's a program that scrapes the web.

Amazing how did you get these records and questions!?

Just polling the HNQ list every 10 minutes (started here), combined with the results from a SEDE query.

Awarded bounty. The Q has been viewed 7,581 times. It disappeared from HNQ when the bounty was placed on it.

Can you update anything or provide greater insight? See "probing" EL&U meta post. Do you agree with Bron's graphs/results/conclusions about EL&U? Can one expect similar results on smaller sites? Does an HNQ seriously risks lose momentum once it is bountied? According to my limited experience and very limited experiments, this appears to be the case.

One of the problems analyzing this is that Stack Exchange does not store historical view counts. (My scraper does, but only for HNQs.) I could set up a small experiment where I monitor the view counts every ~15 minutes on all (recent) questions on EL&U (including those with bounties), but that would take some programming and have to wait at the very least until the weekend, but maybe even Christmas holidays given my current to-do list. Can you wait so long?

FWIW I do not think bounties can have a negative effect on an HNQ; what you see would've happened to the question even if not bountied. The hotness formula does not penalize bountied questions in any way.

Hi, I just think placing a bounty on a question that is currently on HNQ somehow penalises it. It shouldn't, in theory, but in practice it does. I saw it with my question and the 7K post. Coincidence? The two posts were already predestined to drop out from HNQ. Maybe. But... it's odd nevertheless.

I'll try to construct a timeline (with votes & views) for the question you bountied (well, at least for the time it still was on the HNQ). Should be a nice graph, at least. And thanks for the bounty!