Comment by freehorse

I think a lot of people here seem to totally fail to understand the user's perspective. Reporting on bugs is hard, because adding actual, helpful context to a bug is actual (free) labour. Yes, filtering out useless reports is hard for you, but that's the price you are gonna have to pay for having people do free labour (you get some unhelpful reports). You want to increase signal-to-noise ratio by focusing on decreasing the noise, whereas you should actually focus on increasing the signal.

Making simple, useless bug reports is easy and it will always be the easiest. Also the "my neighbour spies for the government" types will anyway always be the most motivated ones. There is no way to make it hard for "bad" reports without making it harder also for useful reports (barring some obvious cases of bots, ip filters etc, which are not what is discussed here and are a general problem not just for bug feedback). By trying to reduce the noise, you also reduce the signal thus get a worse SNR.

The specific tool is smart in trying to increase the signal. If you make it easier for users to add some useful context, MAYBE you get more users actually giving you sth useful, maybe even users who otherwise would not bother to add anything more useful than "it does not work".

I use software that recently made much simpler to make bug reports and add context, and they say they actually receive much better bug reports after. And most importantly, the users actually see that the bugs get fixed, which motivate them to make more, and more detailed, bug reports. Imo getting bugs fixed (and maybe even recognise the users' contribution in reporting them) is the best way to get good bug reports. Honestly, from my user's perspective having my feedback taken seriously is the best motivation for me to continue submitting reports. Because, honestly, sometimes bugs come up in complex situations that may be tricky to understand/reproduce, and it is hard to understand what context is relevant. I am not usually motivated as a user to spend like 20 minutes figuring out exactly how to reproduce a bug, but if I see that the company/engineers actually care and try to make it easy to me to report to them, I may actually do it.

Yes you are gonna have bad interactions also (and remember people have their own jobs/lives/not enough time to always engage with you the way you may want them to in providing feedback), but the point is to increase the good/useful interactions (compared to them), not decrease interactions in general. Unless you do not care much about bug reports anyway, that's also fine.