The intention is to provide context about the post you’re currently reading if there’s a direct reply that’s not located near it (we suppress those expansions if the reply is immediately before/after the post it references). It’s completely optional assistance.
Note that we also don’t include reply controls on embedded posts, so if you wanted to reply to a reply, you’d have to click the arrow to go to where the reply is located in the topic, rather than the embedded reference to it.
