Maybe it wouldn’t work for internet chats, but for discussing complex topics as a team? Yes!
Because when you read enough of the common things people debate, like whether dynamically typed languages are a very bad idea, or how we should address global warming, or stuff like that, you quickly realize there's only a few clusters of arguments which can probably be summarized in a few words each. If you know those clusters, it becomes increasingly hard to add anything different to the discussion... but most people have already heard each of the cluster arguments but did not accept it, which is why the topic remains unresolved - despite the fact that, if everyone agreed on the factual nature of each claim, there would be a mathematically optimal answer. I think the problem is not finding the answer, but accepting the arguments - which you can't get people to do in any case where some judgement is needed.
But I'm not sure you can get an automated map from comments to ideas, no matter what data structure you use...
(Perhaps you could edit in a circular quote of this... :)