Haha maybe I should have said empathetic instead of nice? They used personal language, gave me a sense of how many people applied for how many seats and (I felt) just humanized the process a little. The others I got were generic and curt. The Stanford one is below:
"I am very sorry to inform you that the Admissions Committee has not accepted your application to the Stanford doctoral program in Sociology. We had an especially large applicant pool of hundreds of students competing for only 6 spaces in our program. As you can imagine, this made our selection process extremely difficult, forcing us to turn down many outstanding candidates. We apologize that, given the large number of applications, we are not in a position to provide individual feedback to those we are unable to accept. We very much appreciate your interest in Stanford and wish you all the best for the future."