I wonder how much disk space is wasted in the entire world on just images that get reuploaded on different sites.

The efficiency autism in me wants so bad that any individual image only needs to be uploaded once online, and then people can just embed that original one natively into their social media posts, or when they use it as an avatar, or whatever else.

Instead of uploading an image for your post, have a textbox to paste a direct URL, and have the site just incorporate that into it's HTML, instead of the link to the local database you'd have for a typical upload.
This would obviously have security issues, but that efficiency obsessed part of me demands this must be done, no matter the price.

Or just bring back forum embeds.