Anyone who works somewhere like the NYT is going to be highly literate, and well aware of how overmatched written language already is to these supposed problems. So when they write stuff like this, it’s hard not to detect a tone of condescension or veiled sneering (“look, Rutherford, the proles have invented another new crutch to try to understand subtext! Wait ‘til I tell the fellows at my club about this one”).
Here’s the thing about tone: if it was a concrete, conscious thought, and the writer meant to make it clear, they would have done so in the first place.
What makes neurotypical people hard to understand is that they send and receive messages that they themselves aren’t conscious of. If you ask people to explicitly flag what non-verbal cues they think they’re sending, their guess probably isn’t even as good as yours.
This “tone indicators” business reminds me of a trope I’ve seen a couple of times on TV where a high-functioning autistic person has to refer to a chart of facial expressions (an hilarious joke). IDK if this has some basis in reality, but either way it’s pretty insulting. Autistic folks can see expressions just fine, and may even be better than most at consciously decoding them, out of necessity. The problem is that normal people don’t have to expend conscious effort processing those signals.
I can see the good intention here, but I am pretty sure the solution misdiagnoses the problem. And if the practice became common, it could easily become yet another vector for misunderstandings and bad faith.
For my money, anyone who thinks they need this could better spend their time just working on their reading and writing.
