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That's basically how discussions work in Wikipedia (and other MediaWiki projects). Discussion pages are just a giant text file which anyone can edit fully. The only extra feature over Notepad is an implicit edit history.

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What made this workable was that discussions were rarely "hot" - typically you discussed with one or two users over a span of many hours / days. Once you got many people editing the discussion page at the same time, you got conflicts which were solvable but annoying.

(My experience is more than 10 years old, though)

It feels like a straight line to that from the c2 wiki, where that was all pages, not just discussion pages. Discussion happened inline.

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