Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy

As a consumer who reports bugs, I’d actually say the opposite problem is just as common — when the company ghosts you after you’ve taken the time to report an issue.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve used the official channels — bug trackers, support forums, contact forms — only to hear nothing back. No acknowledgement, no follow-up, no notification when it’s fixed. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever had a company let me know that a bug I reported was resolved.

Reporting a bug to most companies feels like sending a wishlist to Santa. That’s why many people don’t bother. They assume it’s a waste of time — and most of the time, they’re right.

Personally, if a company fails to engage over a bug report, I don’t waste my time reporting anything else. In many cases, I just move to the competition. I’m sure I’m not alone.

If a user goes to the time of helping you fix your software, the least you can do is spend some time on them.

>But mostly, it’s worth fixing bugs. Even if they are “harmless” bugs, they may reduce the reputation of your company and your product, which, in the long run, will have a significant impact on your earnings. It’s hard to overcome the reputation of having a buggy product.

It cuts both ways. Guess what's one of the most popular format for apps and webpages to report failures to the user?

"Oops. Something went wrong."

Not exactly overflowing with useful information, either.

Sure, the system is probably logging the fault internally, and is always collecting metrics that help with contextualization later. But the system and its owner aren't usually the ones most affected by any given bug - it's the user who is. The user who's now worrying whether it means they're about to lose the time and work they put in the current session, or whether the app just ate their money (failures half-way through payment processes are the cutest, aren't they?). They don't know - maybe the "Oops!" was just benign, or irrelevant. Then again, maybe they've already lost it all 10 minutes ago - back when the previous "Oops!" briefly flashed to gently inform them that the service's back-end tripped over itself and died - but they won't discover that until later, at which point they'll be neither able nor willing to make a proper bug report.

Point being, if one sees their users as being 5 years old (but with parents' credit card in hands), one shouldn't be surprised to only ever get a kindergarten-level error reports like the ones you mentioned[0].

This is not just me complaining on a tangential issue - I believe showing specific and accurate error messages improves the ratio of useful error reports. It's not a full solution, but it's a step in the right direction. Treating them as partners, instead of a bunch of brats you have to put up with until they complete the payment, makes them more willing to reciprocate; giving users means to contextualize their experience allows some of them[1] to understand what's going on, and gives them something useful to put in the report too.

That, or I guess nowadays you can also keep the "Oops."-es, double-down on telemetry, and feed the metrics to a SOTA LLM to identify and interpret failures for your engineering/operations team, which we all know has neither time nor patience to do it.

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[0] - "Page doesn't work" is the adult version of a kid suddenly starting to cry for unclear and possibly non-specific reason.

[1] - Obviously, not all, or even most. Software is complex, most users still behave as if half-drunk and unable to read, etc. Still, even 5 year olds can comprehend basic words and identify patterns. Figuring out that "could not connect to payment gateway" is serious, that "failed to write [blah blah tech terms]" that happens at random is probably not, etc. is within the cognitive reach of most users.

I'm aware of the issue in mobile devices too, will push an update later tonight to fix it.