why people [well me] don't report bugs
Bug trackers, especially those with more than a few bugs... are extremely overwealming.
When you expect people to not only report bugs, but ALSO do all the bug triage themselves, it literally becomes so overwealming that even trying to report a bug is not worth the effort.
Yes i understand that its hard for devs to wade through many duplicates, but it is often much harder for non-technical, burned out, and disabled people to do that whole process.
why people [well me] don't report bugs
my recommendation would to be, for projects to assign someone to do bug triage, yes, its very boring work, but expecting the person reporting the bug to do it, only results in poorer quality original reports that result in someone who could give better reports not bothering or bugs to not be reported at all
imo both of those options are worse than having one of your volunteers to sit down and just, sift through the new reports every night and close the dups
why people [well me] don't report bugs
i say "well me" in the CW, but i know its far far more than just me.
the number of people i've ran into who just have basically spoken and said they've outright not reported bugs because of this is actually extremely high.
heck. some of my best bug reports came from /IRC/ and people complaining about my software's issues. I literally copied the log into our bug tracker and used it to actually figure stuff out.