The other day, I was trying to use a Python library to scrape some stuff. It kept breaking. I looked on the issues page and there were many, essentially useless bug reports asking them to fix the issue. I opened up the script and changed about 7 lines and it worked fine.
At times I imagine there could be some kind of "I know how to report bugs"-certification that people could somehow earn. Projects could then use this as a barrier to prevent getting too many useless issue reports.
The problem really goes both ways - as a software dev I'm disincentivized to report detailed bugs to projects, because there's a high risk it will get drowned out in the noise.
Some projects have quite specific templates for reporting issues. This helps a bit, but you still need someone to go in and remove issues that don't match the template, and few people want to volunteer for that work.
I mostly use GitHub to find off the shelf solutions to whatever problem I’m having or to avoid doing the work myself. If I run into any problems I have with something from there, I either try and fix it by tweaking the repository, using another, or just building the thing myself. I think the last time I reported an issue on an external repository was because of something I was made to use at work.
No code, no PRs, just a way for the public to create Issues.
Not sure what this means for the "culture of code" other than things are blurring...