In the short term, just adding square brackets "[ reply ]" might make them stand out a bit from the rest of the text. This also matches the section edit link style:

and here with the reduced font size that section edit links use (13px):

In T249578#6037173, @Esanders wrote:

In the short term, just adding square brackets "[ reply ]" might make them stand out a bit from the rest of the text...

@iamjessklein, are you able to share what you think of what @Esanders is proposing above?

To make evaluating the proposed solution easier, Ed came up with a way for us to see how it will look on live pages. See the "Testing instructions" below.

My instinct: let's deploy it and see how people react.

Testing instructions

1. Visit any talk page on one of our partner wikis (e.g. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overleg_portaal:Gebruikersportaal)
2. Open your browser's 'Console' by typing ⌥+⌘+J
3. Paste the following into the browser's 'Console': $('.dt-init-replylink-reply').replaceWith('[ <a href="#">reply</a> ]') (Note: clicking the "Reply" links will not work)

Nice work @Esanders

I think that this is a good solution to test for educational purposes. Additionally, remember we discussed doing more pronounced changes in conjunction with the visual refresh release, so that's good to have in the back of our minds as we iterate on this.

One nit: The styling of "Reply" should probably have parody with other actions, so in that case I would capitalize it.

cc/@ppelberg

While the toolbar actions are capitalised, the inline section edit links on which this is based are not capitalised.

@iamjessklein Hi, There is no capitalized characters in some languages like in Arabic.

In our planning meeting @iamjessklein determined for now it can be lower case.

Change 604114 had a related patch set uploaded (by Esanders; owner: Esanders):
[mediawiki/extensions/DiscussionTools@master] Add square brackets around reply link and use lower case (when possible)

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/604114

Adding "Done" to task description; thank you for the screenshots, Ed.

The spacing between the brackets at the text is 0.25em which is the same as section edit links (although those use a smaller font size). I also increased the spacing between the whole button and the comment from 0.25em to 0.5em.

In terms of an interim step this looks alright. After the last round of usability tests, I have a stronger conviction that these should ultimately be buttons.
cc @ppelberg

Change 604114 merged by jenkins-bot:
[mediawiki/extensions/DiscussionTools@master] Add square brackets around reply link and use lower case (when possible)

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/604114