Seems like we abandoned this type of emotional, personal rhetoric not because it didn't work but because it worked too well at manipulating people's opinions. I wonder if we can return to it without losing our grasp of reality.
I'm imagining YouTube (or maybe even HN) comments becoming dominated by stories of harm supposed people have supposedly experienced. There's no way to tell if a person you're interacting with in these kinds of contexts has actually experienced the harm they claim or if it's just being used to manipulate. So I'd agree that in the case of internet forums I'm not entirely sure this is a step in the right direction. For person-to-person, face-to-face interactions IRL it would be a different story as you could rely on non-verbal cues to help determine validity and you might have a history of relationship with the person you're interacting with.
