Your message made me wonder—have you investigated how Discourse utilizes the information it gleans from such HTTP pings? Does it simply track that a link has been clicked 3 times, or that User X, User Y, and User Z clicked the link (and perhaps along with timing information and other details)?
I personally consider the two scenarios to be fundamentally different—tracking the popularity of assets within a post, vs tracking the behavior of specific users.
This is not to say I wouldn’t like a site setting to control this feature. I think it would be great 