I am sympathetic because that one is subtle. It all comes down to one existential question:
What is a topic without a first post?
Well, it’s a title, and a category, and maybe author metadata. So it’s kind of like a Twitter message. But the first post in the topic goes a long way toward fully and completely articulating what the hell the topic is actually about. Or … not at all, depending on the competency and talent (and bias, etc) of the person writing that first post.
The issue is that you may indeed want to reply to the general theme of the topic rather than any specific thing one particular person said – even the person who created the first post.
But yeah, it’s a subtle distinction that doesn’t have to mean anything. Can we meaningfully separate the person talking in the first post from the underlying topic? I think if you take the community guidelines advice to
criticize ideas, not people
… then yes, we should be advocating reply-to-topic versus reply-to-person as not just a possibility but something we encourage.
The way I think of it is this, approach the first post the same way you approach every post in the topic:
Do you feel an urgent need to reply to specific words said in this post?
If so then click reply on the first post (or highlight the words you wish to reply to and click quote reply, etc). Otherwise, it doesn’t matter – reply at the bottom because you weren’t interested enough in any individual post to reply to it specifically.
