Comment 13 for bug 330550

@karl

The motivation is this. It's all to do with psychology.

1. I have a problem with (say) Ubuntu.
2. I go to Launchpad to report it as a bug.
3. I type in the summary, and Launchpad gives me a list of likely bugs that have already been reported.
4. I check out a likely bug, and see that it does indeed apply to me.

What do I do next?

I have been through an involved process and I'm left feeling like "oh well... I did all that and I don't get to *do* anything"

In this situation, some users will deal with it and think "yeah, great, it's already been reported, so that saves me some time".

Some users will feel that need to write a "me too!" comment. We don't want this because it reduces the signal-to-noise ratio for everyone.

Some users will not write a "me too!" comment, and will do nothing, but will have an irrational feeling that they just wasted 5 minutes writing a bug summary for a bug that will never get filed.

To avoid these feeling of wasted effort, and to avoid the noisy "me too!" comments, we provide a "this affects me too!" button that the user can press to indicate that the bug does affect them. This gives some information about how many people would have filed duplicates but did not do so. So, comparing it to the number of duplicates in Launchpad, over time, can give us an idea of how effectively we are preventing duplicates being filed through our bug filing process.

It's also psychologically important to provide something for the user to do or see at the end of this bug filing process, and to allow them to feel there has been a dialogue, that they have put effort into using Launchpad correctly, and that effort has been rewarded by something listening to them. Having them click "this bug does indeed apply to me", and having Launchpad acknowledge that, neatly finishes the process that was started when the user wanted to file the bug. "Yay, someone is interested in listening to the fact that I had this problem!"