tl;dr - lose the "Reply" button that appears in each post on a thread.
Appy polly loggies if this has already been beaten to death talked about… I still haven't found how to properly search these fora.
Formerly there was only "reply", a reply entered its place in the thread and life went on. It was always easy to make it clear if the reply was to someone in particular.
Now there's reply to the post, as well as the old "global" reply. It is true that the subthread replies also appear in the top level feed, so I am not sure I see the advantage.
The disadvantage or tricky part, is being careful - if you use the nice copy and quote on a post, it is automatically entered as a reply to that post. So I have to remember (yes, yes, 2nd nature already) to copy, not quote the portion I want.
Curiously the text is the same, this turns up another flaw - you cannot see while composing a reply that it is to an individual post rather than global. Or I do not see the indication. So at the very least there should be something to provide a clue bout that.
But I feel the reply button should not be an option on the post itself.
a7