Would you be more interested in reading a feed/chat of the thoughts of a select few people? In other words, if the chat thread creator could restrict who could chat, so the feed doesn't get so overwhelmed? Almost like a text-based version of Clubhouse?
Watching a chatroom of important people chatting doesn't sound terribly compelling, would need some sort of interaction/audience feedback mechanism and feels like it could get a bit podcasty, which many like but just not for me.
Tools to dynamically manage visibility of certain voices in the stream could be interesting. Like what if text size/color scaled with vote score - so annoying voices would shrink until hardly visible. Global per user weight score mixed with a personally configurable list of score offsets for any user previously interacted with could be neat. If you like what someone is saying, their future messages show up more clearly.
When I browse through the rooms, the only messages visible on the screen are whatever was said recently - the only way to get 'caught up' is scroll through the entire thing. What is shown often doesn't seem connected to the topic. could be interesting to load the top N messages of the channel's entire history with 'expand' options in between each one which loads the top M messages within that range.
I would like this feature, then if you want to have your stuff posted to said restricted room, and you are not a member of the approved posters group, you could post your post and it would go into moderation, and if a given text poster thinks your messages worth posting, they could ungate it from moderation to actual post, where your text would show up as 'your user says X approved by 'approved user' and potentially add you permissions to post in replies and branches to your approved posts if they want to deputize you as a partially approved poster
