Of course one can do it by hand. Manual till it hurts and all that. But one shouldn't have to. I am not a developer so I don't know how hard it would be to give the New Post entry form the same Reply field that Status has. And logically, I would have thought a Post was more likely than a Status actually to be a reply.
The sound of your original post and the reply are making me think that you're manually opening up your site in a browser, clicking on the "Status Update" piece of the UI, then manually clicking on the "Reply to a site" button, and then manually cutting and pasting the URL in for replies every time. Does this mean you're not using the browser bookmarklet to generate all of your responses?!!
If this is the case, then hie thee to https://stream.jeremycherfas.net/account/settings/tools/ and drag the bookmarklet button (which likely has your name on it) to your browser bar! Then when you're on a web page you'd like to respond to, click on the bookmarklet to pull up a slightly more sophisticated UI (pictured in link) that will allow you to share, reply, bookmark, RSVP, like, and repost as you prefer (depending on your plugin collection). When you choose the "reply" tab, the UI should have the "reply to a site" URL pre-filled for your convenience! Type your reply, choose syndication destinations, and click "publish".
http://stream.boffosocko.com/file/7c7d5dfebbb14f620d5595395e42ef1d/bookmarklet+UI.PNG
In some sense this will make your replies only replies, your status updates only updates, and your posts articles that can only mention other articles (unless you manually do what I'd done before). In the initial case I outlined above, you're manually creating statuses which technically get turned into replies by manually adding the reply URL. The difference can be seen in visiting/comparing the URLs http://stream.jeremycherfas.net/content/statusupdates/ and http://stream.jeremycherfas.net/content/replies/.
I pray that you've known this all along, you'll forgive my "indiesplain", and that I'm not catching the subtlety of your original post. The Known bookmarklet is 90% of the beauty of the system and drastically cuts back on the manual 'til it hurts portion of the program. And of course if it doesn't make sense, let me know and I'll make a video of the process or we can do a screen share if necessary. I'm addicted to bookmarklets of all kinds, but realize that not everyone uses them the way (or to the extreme) that I do.
If not, I'm not sure I fully understand your original issue or why you'd want to create a new post (with a title) to do replies to others' content, and I'll have to revisit the issue you're having.
Chris Aldrich, Jul 08 2017 on stream.boffosocko.com