1- Saves them the trouble to edit the earlier quotes
2- The earlier quote may be necessary to convey the right context to the reply
Coming to the reasons for using different colored fonts-
Ease of differentiating the replies and the original post, especially while addressing several parts of a long post
Blue color gets used most commonly because it is thought to be less strenuous on the eye at the same time maintaining contrast between the reply and the quote making it easy to distinguish the two.
From my observation the preference for the colors in a descending order range from black, blue, red , pink followed by others
Italics or larger /bold fonts in same (black) color could be used but while accessing a long post it can create some confusion since the original post may contain words in italics or bold.
It gets more difficult when we have a rainbow of colors used to reply to earlier replies in a different color. I however feel that it is better to quote those portions separately instead of using multiple colors one after the other in the same quote to reply, then reply the reply and so on'as one can easily lose track of the chronology of colors being used.
Using separate quotes while replying should be the better thing to do in the first place but it gets tedious to put the parts of a long post into several separate quotes, moreover at times the quoting mechanism on IF acts quite funny!
As for chatting on the threads a few occasional chats and straying from the topic is acceptable but I agree that it should be kept to a minimum.
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