Say what you want about Apple’s overpriced products, marketing BS and anti-consumer behavior. At least they treat their users as consumers, not products or slaves. They may be promoters of consumerism and leaders of some truly awful trends in the tech industry, but there are worse things a company can do.

“If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” Someone came up with this one-liner to describe Google’s business model. It sums up how Google and other ad-supported tech companies make money. But it isn’t quite broad enough to capture the essence of what’s wrong with the tech industry.

These companies want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to sell user data to advertisers, effectively packaging them as products. However, they will then treat the same users as junkies who cannot possibly survive without their platform, failing to recognize that users are the most valuable aspect of the platform, not their technology. Like drug dealers, they assume that their technology is so good that people hooked on it will keep coming back no matter what. Unfortunately, this might be true in some cases.

A prime example of the latter practice is Reddit’s recent decision to drastically raise API pricing for developers, which would make third-party apps financially unviable. Reddit is made up of communities (subreddits) run by unpaid volunteers, who essentially act as employees by moderating forums and contributing to them. They may be the minority, but they are the most dedicated Reddit users and would be most impacted by lack of third-party apps. Reddit is banking on the ad- and AI-driven data-mining craze to turn itself into a profitable money-making operation and seduce potential investors when it goes public later this year. But in doing so, it is ignoring the concerns of its dedicated core of users, deeming them replaceable and dismissing their true contributions. It is also betting that the vast majority of its users will not care, which may turn out to be true if the quality of subreddits don’t nosedive as a result of this disruption.