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IMHO, "hotlinking" isn't the same as directing people from social media directly to an image url. You can still put <img src="http://imgur.com/..."> on your web page and it will still work. The context of doing that is different from pointing someone directly to an image with the intent of showing it to them.

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And how will that continue to work when if it goes beyond Twitter, G+, and FB? Most browsers send a referrer in HTTP GET for the img tag. It works now for those because google and facebook grok the html, pull out the image, and cache it.

In an <img> context, your browser should send an appropriate Accept header[1]; this can be switched upon in the backend to select the appropriate representation (e.g., to serve an image rather than HTML). So hotlinked images should continue to work, while normal links will redirect to the HTML wrapper.

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[1] Though, rather unfortunately, most browsers do not seem to send reasonable Accept headers. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTTP/Content_negoti..., "Default Values" and "Values for an image".

Uh, well if it went beyond direct links from social media then it probably would break hotlinking. Hasn't done that though -- not yet, anyway.

In your estimation, when did the definition of hotlinking change to what you portray?

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