One of the chief benefits I find to providing links when in a discussion is - I get to realise I'm wrong before I've posted. I'll have some half-remembered quot

One of the chief benefits I find to providing links when in a discussion is - I get to realise I'm wrong before I've posted. I'll have some half-remembered quote or statistic in my head and I want to provide a link to evidence it. But after finding a decent source I find that I've misremembered something - usually it's a minor detail but sometimes not and sometimes it undermines the point I was going to make. That kind of self-fact checking is enormously useful since i) I look less of a fool and much more importantly ii) Less bullshit is propagated overall. I'm not sure how you can know that "nobody is really reading [your links]" - on most forums the number of people reading a thread will heavily outnumber the people participating. Who knows how many people are reading your links, perhaps months later? Even when not in a discussion/debate I think providing a link is just good manners. Searching for something might only take 2-3 minutes but why should every single one of your readers have to do that? Isn't it more efficient that I do it once and provide the link? This is especially true when there are multiple versions/editions of (for example) videos with very similar titles but different quality or subtly different content. A URL helps to say "This is the specific thing I was talking about".