I'm just curious (and I'm leaving a poll here in case people want to remain anonymous), but do readers prefer the author to reply to the comments using the "REPLY" feature or to reply in a separate comment chunk? Like, what I mean by separate comment chunk is that one reader posts a comment, and the author would reply to the comment by posting another comment, addressing the reader as "@USERNAME: blah blah blah"?

I've been on AFF for a couple of years, and back then, we didn't have a reply feature so we'd go like "@____: blah blah blah" and post it in a separate comment on our story. It's become a habit for me to do that, but I'm just wondering if people do that anymore.