IMHO, there is no “reply guy” anti-pattern, and I wish people would stop using that toxic term.
There is something I call the living room problem, and it affects all social media to some degree, because social media confuses locality.
We’re not really evolved to navigate cyberspace. Even that name is a hint of that. Because cyberspace is information, which can be linked in a myriad of dimensions. But what we’re evolved to navigate is three dimensional space.
And so our social norms are, to some degree, connected to physical proximity. We have our personal space, and it’s an act of intimacy to invite people into it, and violence of sorts to push in.
I call this personal space our living room for illustration purposes, and contrast it to a public forum like speaker’s corner.
We are curious about the world, so we invite information into our living room. That may be a neighbour to share gossip with, or a newspaper we read, or TV we watch. All of this happens in our personal space. And to be clear on the image, our personal space also exists outside of the living room, it’s just that the living room is literally our space, while personal space is an abstract concept that moves with the person.
Now we can also say things in our personal space, and due to the intimacy of inviting people in, we can rightly expect that we get to control what people do with the things we say - we’ll say things like “this stays between us, but X also knows” or whatever.
If we want to share things with the whole world, we go on TV or write a newspaper article. But to use a space metaphor, it’s better to describe this as standing on a soap box at speaker’s corner. We can expect some form of debate to be sparked, merely by stepping into this open space where debate happens.
Social media do not make a distinction between these two spaces, and I’m pretty sure that confuses our spatially evolved social brain. Our feed is simultaneously the information we invite into our living room, and our soap box at speaker’s corner.
Worse, to the onlooker, if you speak anything it is as if you said this in their living room. They invited your information in by subscribing, after all.
So now we have a space where we as speaker cannot distinguish between the public square and the personal space, and everybody has the same right to lay claim to the same space.
This cannot really work amicably.
Blogs, for example, are different. Your feed reader is a distinct space from their comment form. Or you can reply on your own blog/soap box.
“Social” media has a living room problem, not a reply guy anti pattern, IMHO.