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byrnema comments on Hyperlinks and Less Wrong - Less Wrong Discussion
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I really like hyperlinks as well. What I use them for (and like them for) is to keep track of the flow of an idea.
As I develop an idea, I often remember some places where that idea came from and I'll link to the 'seeds' of that idea. The 'seeds' can be my own comments or someone else's, and I feel I am pretty good at organizing information in this way.
Reading through a set of threads in a page, there is often an obvious vacuum where some other ideas should be linked. On Less Wrong, the same conversations occur over and over. Sometimes a conversation that is very interesting to me fizzles out and when that conversation spontaneously picks up again, it seems important to connect them with links.
Ultimately, I model Less Wrong as a brain, where more links between ideas corresponds to fast, more complex, non-linear and higher order thinking.
I agree it can be annoying and frustrating. In response to SarahC's comment here where she writes:
I agree and feel the same way but it would be worse if the links weren't there. While there's a nagging sense of incompletion if you don't link, without the links there is a real lack of completion. (Sometimes, knowing that humans can't realistically follow, keep track of or care about all these interconnections, I imagine I am doing this for a future artificial intelligence building a model of how humans develop ideas or for a graduate student writing a thesis about the development of physical materialist viewpoints in the 21st century).
We can definitely improve hyperlink use with a list of best practices. For example, while referring to SarahC's comment above I also copied the sentence I was referring to. I think this was helpful (you don't need to follow the link, I already included the relevant information) and I did this consciously in response to criticisms I've read about hyperlinks in this post.