Do you have anything to substantiate this or are you just going to remain ignorant? Hotlinking was creating a massive bandwidth problem, this is a perfectly valid solution - you don't control content on other people's site and should have absolutely no expectation of such.
Why call me ignorant? I understand perfectly at the technical level what happened, but words like "hotlinking" and "bandwidth" and "solution" shouldn't come into play here at all. If your logic made you permanently imprint a shock image on thousands of impressionable minds you're not the hero. How much did it even cost to upload a 60kB image half a million times per month in 2007? $10?[1]
[0] https://statista.com/statistics/266881/myspace-users-in-the-... but it's of course the parents' fault for not reading the RFCs and realizing that sadistic web hosts were a flaw in Tim Berners-Lee's design
[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-economics-of-bandwidth/
This is disingenuous. He didn't show them anything; they went looking and found something they didn't want. As they say, you can't go to shit's house and be surprised when shit is home.
>They probably didn't even understand the mechanism
Which is their problem, regretful as it may be. Or more realistically, it's their parents' problem.
>words like "hotlinking" and "bandwidth" and "solution" shouldn't come into play here at all.
That was the problem that started it, so they're absolutely relevant. Pretending that this doesn't matter is willful ignorance. No one was made to view anything.