So page bloat is a real issue, not just "old man rants about good old days". A shame really because the rest of the page is pretty light wieght, 5.2kb for the content and 2.2 for the css.
Even worse is that the static preview of the monster gif is the second largest element.
If you use it only occasionally to read a few articles, you can do fine with only a few megabytes. Heck, I'd almost say kilobytes if bloat wasn't so common. Anyway, that's until shit like this comes along. If you were truly trying to watch a video---sure, that uses a lot of that tiny data bundle in one go, but a gif that should have been a video truly leaves you wondering why was this necessary?!
Sadly, because of the "HTTPS everywhere!!!11" thing, such a service would not be viable (it would need to rewrite the <img> to a <video> in order to work, of course).
Many web services will take an uploaded gif and turn it to webm before showing it, e.g. Twitter.