How to give a bonus to an answer that was not accepted after the question was closed

Question

I recently asked a question about (not) reading Shakespeare in class. Two correct answers arrived within a few seconds of each other.

It also rapidly appeared that the question was a dupe.

I wanted to follow user14111's advice to "green check" one answer and give a bonus to the other one. But it seems the only way is to start a bounty. Which needs 48 hours delay. So I carefully did not accept either answer, to wait till I could start the bounty. I wanted to start it, wait for another 24 hours to grant it to one answer and finally "green check" the other one. At which point the question would be closed a dupe.

But since I made clear in my comments that the answers were correct, my question was closed before I could create the bounty. Even though I had not "green check" either answer. Curiously, I was still able to "green check" one answer after the question was closed.

How can I give the bonus to the other one ?

Answer 1

You can accept answers after a question is closed - acceptance and closure are independent.

But you can't start bounties on a closed question. In fact, it goes the other way too: you can't vote to close a question that has an open bounty on it. Bounties and closure block each other. Probably this is because most bounty reasons are to attract new answers rather than reward existing ones, and closure blocks new answers.

In this case, if your goal is simply to give some extra reputation award to the person whose answer you didn't accept, you could find another worthy answer from that user and set a bounty there instead. (Bounties can be set on any open question, not only your own. There's even a badge for bountying someone else's question.)