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Comment by AndrewDucker | Hacker News Reader

That's exactly the reason, so you can test in advance.

(Unless there's some new feature you're really looking forward to. But I'm not aware of many of them.)

I'd usually bow out at this point but if you've ever been on any Windows/Microsoft-related subreddit, there are many many people that download these betas.

I did it once, many years ago, for Windows 10 and my printer started printing out garbage in multiple pages no matter what you printed. At that time I used the printer quite frequently. I'd had no issues until then.

I remember checking to see if printer issues were a thing in that build and they weren't listed.

That was it for me.

To me these movements always remind me of "free testing". If they want testers, pay for them.

Windows beta testing has worked this way for 30 years, if not longer. I was a 'public' Windows 98SE beta tester. I downloaded new 98SE ISOs over 56k once per week and wiped that machine clean once per week.

The only compensation I ever got was from beta testing DirectX 5?, I think, and I received a MS Force Feedback Pro joystick for filing the most bugs.

You're not testing to tell MS that there's a bug. You're testing to make sure that your software doesn't break on the latest version of Windows.

You are actually testing for both, as an insider your feedback is asked every now and then, also you report issues you encounter willingly (Get Help metro app) or unwillingly (System Service/App stopped responding, collecting data and sending it to MS)

"Insiders" get (got?) to use Windows without license/activation as long as they stay on the latest version. That can be seen as "payment". The rest of the users get to offer QA services for free, after the repeated layoffs in the MS's QA departments.

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