I think the reason linear feeds remain popular is because they emulate conversation, and nothing else. Conversation something everybody knows how to do. Our brains know how to manage relatively complex and disorganized discourse, some better than others.

The problem doesn’t seem so much to be with the real time participants of the conversation. The problem is if you weren’t there to begin with. Reading chat logs is probably like attempting to read the transcript of your family holiday dinner. It would be nonsense. You’d have no sense of time, no sense of delay, no sense of conversational flurry, etc. As a passive “participant” reading the conversation, you’re disengaged from the very construction that led to it at all, so in practice you lose a sense of context or continuity.

So these proposed solutions are asking you to do more than communicate. They’re asking you to also organize. And the problem with asking users to organize in addition to communicate is that it’s easier to just not organize.