the 'misery memoir' sector seems to be booming, though I suspect it'll eventually become all too samey. It may be that in hard times (and these are fairly hard) people like to be reassured that it could be a lot worse.
Also, people like to remind themselves that they do still have a sense of right and wrong and they don't let themselves become immune to tales of mistreatment. There's a fair bit of it on AB: every time there's a child abuse case someone will post a link to it in the News section and others will come on to say how awful it is. They're quite right, of course, though I don't know how much good it does some of them to fantasise about the many ways they'd like to see the guilty people tortured.