The 'at' sign on Twitter is stupid anywhere else

If you aren't on Twitter, there is no reason to use the "@" character when responding to people on comments on webpages. See, before there was Twitter, and before there was the Internet, if you were addressing a written passage to someone named Fred, you would type:

Fred, I am responding to ...

You just type the person's name and then a comma. If you go back in time before Twitter, no one would type:

@Fred: ...

See, the "@" symbol has a function in Twitter's programming, to direct the message to the account called "Fred." Anywhere else it looks stupid.