> Just by including the other points in the discussion, but being unwilling to extrapolate on them
That seems a bit strong. The statement was "won't go into rn (right now)".
> compromises the entire discussion.
It does. I'm not saying it causes no problems. I'm saying it shouldn't be grounds to immediately discount all other evidence given. It's perfectly valid as a modifier to another piece of evidence where you might use it to weight it, but I don't think it's valid to immediately ignore everything else said.
> The only reason you include some vague "Amazon did shady shit" in a tweet is to elicit an emotional response on the part of the reader and immediately biases the argument against Amazon.
No, that's one possible reason, it's not the only reason. Other possible reasons might be to signal other people more involved in the events in question that if they want to share their own story, perhaps now is the time and opening that makes that easier for them.
I agree that the presented argument would have been better without that statement, but that doesn't immediately negate the merit of what else is presented.
> The argument is not based on merit; it never can be now, because it's been tainted. This is known as "poisoning the well" [0].
The mistake you're making is in assuming that poisoning the well applies to and discredits non-dependent clauses. It should be easy to see how this applies when you consider the two statements "You should beware of John, he's made some threatening gestures to me and you in the past, and I there's been some assaults in the area" and "You should beware of John, he's threatening gestures to me and you in the past and multiple people have seen him assault three people recently." In one case it's used to imply guilt of something that is not factually proven or stated, in the other there's a fact to readily look into for confirmation that you can use as evidence to make up your own mind. That someone uses a call to emotion beforehand should not immediately discount that fact from consideration.
> Even in this thread, commenters are saying how they implicitly trust Steve not because of the merits of his argument, but because of his personal brand.
That's not what I've said, and not what I'm asking of you.
> But this "discussion" was brought up completely the wrong way by him, and any outcome is going to be tainted.
It may be tainted in some way. That doesn't mean easily verifiable facts should be ignored.
To be absolutely clear, since it seems very hard for some people to get my point, I have no qualms with your mistrusting him, or thinking his factual statements have no merit or are not problematic enough to act on. I just don't think it's valid to completely ignore the factual statements and refuse to consider them as you seemed to indicate you were doing because he also says "Amazon is being a meany in other ways too" and doesn't expound on it, and some other statements may not be as well supported as they could.