It’s wild when I read a professional looking website like this and Conscious Digital misspells their own org name as “Consious Digital” in the first paragraph. I’m glad they’re fighting against email spam but it just raises all sorts of red flags in my mind, or at least it used to.
Funny enough, these days it indicates the article was written by a human. I had a dev join my team and made a few typos and it gave me a chuckle, as it’s a whole class of mistake I hadn’t seen in awhile.
That site doesn't seem to support pages loading either.
edit: I feel their pain - I've spent the past week fighting AI scrapers on multiple sites hitting routes that somehow bypass Cloudflare's cache. Thousands of requests per minute, often to URLs that have never even existed. Baidu and OpenAI, I'm looking at you.
The "required login" pattern is particularly a problem. I seem to have namesakes around the US and UK that use my email address as their own when signing up for various services (mobile phone services, Shopify, Uber, various banks and investment firms, landscaper services, real estate services, home and car insurance, car repair shops, even Silver Daddies!!).
I can't open an issue (to ask the service to remove my email) without logging in to an account I don't have control over.
I don't want to use "forgot my password", because I don't want my IP address to be associated with a login to the account, because in some cases (particularly Shopify), the services were obviously used for fraud.
In the U.S., requiring a login (or any information other than your email address) to opt out is against the law. Additionally, you cannot require any steps other than "sending a reply electronic mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page."
I once wrote to the FTC for guidance as to whether or not this included requiring unsubscribers to solve a CAPTCHA or disable adblockers or enable Javascript, but did not get a response. I believe the law is plain with regards to this, but a lot of companies seem to be willing to risk it.
So, they're trying to be an online privacy service for users but they require companies work in the way THEY want the companies to operate. This is not a serious organization I need to care about as a user or a service provider. They're just setting themselves up for failure by requiring the world around them to change.
The irony of a site about AI opt-outs getting hammered by AI scrapers is almost too on the nose.
trollbridge's point about scrapers using residential IPs and targeting authentication endpoints matches what we've seen. The scrapers have gotten sophisticated. They're not just crawling, they're probing.
The economics are broken. Running a small site used to cost almost nothing. Now you need to either pay for CDN/protection or spend time playing whack-a-mole with bad actors.
ronsor hosting a front-page HN project on 32MB RAM is impressive and also highlights how much bloat we've normalized. The scraper problem is real, but so is the software efficiency problem.
We Do Not Support Opt-Out Forms (2025)
(consciousdigital.org)89 points by mefengl 27 January 2026 | 43 comments
Comments
This is not how email works, though.
Funny enough, these days it indicates the article was written by a human. I had a dev join my team and made a few typos and it gave me a chuckle, as it’s a whole class of mistake I hadn’t seen in awhile.
edit: I feel their pain - I've spent the past week fighting AI scrapers on multiple sites hitting routes that somehow bypass Cloudflare's cache. Thousands of requests per minute, often to URLs that have never even existed. Baidu and OpenAI, I'm looking at you.
I can't open an issue (to ask the service to remove my email) without logging in to an account I don't have control over.
I don't want to use "forgot my password", because I don't want my IP address to be associated with a login to the account, because in some cases (particularly Shopify), the services were obviously used for fraud.
I once wrote to the FTC for guidance as to whether or not this included requiring unsubscribers to solve a CAPTCHA or disable adblockers or enable Javascript, but did not get a response. I believe the law is plain with regards to this, but a lot of companies seem to be willing to risk it.
See: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-C...
https://web.archive.org/web/20251009081648/https://conscious...
trollbridge's point about scrapers using residential IPs and targeting authentication endpoints matches what we've seen. The scrapers have gotten sophisticated. They're not just crawling, they're probing.
The economics are broken. Running a small site used to cost almost nothing. Now you need to either pay for CDN/protection or spend time playing whack-a-mole with bad actors.
ronsor hosting a front-page HN project on 32MB RAM is impressive and also highlights how much bloat we've normalized. The scraper problem is real, but so is the software efficiency problem.