It's a tough problem. You really want to be able to take advantage of the tail of contributors -- the people who use one particular product, use it a lot, but have never filed bug reports for other products. I do think a stackoverflow-type solution would be worth a shot -- if you post a good bug report, it will be hopefully easy for people to understand or replicate and will get voted up, without requiring previous posts on your part. That's if you have a "crowd" actually willing to look at these things (might work for Chrome, not sure about small projects).

Maybe the starring system can be this?

You often feel that bug reporting just goes to dev/null

I like how Ubuntu handles this - each bug has a "Bug heat" number, which is determined by how many people say the bug affects them and by other criteria.