I would suggest the backlash would likely be due to the wording of your original comment.

you stated that "Programmer humor is really cringey."

Cringey is generally a negative sentiment and saying "is" implies that this negative sentiment is a generally accepted fact.

I'd suggest that humour is almost entirely subjective, and therefore attempting to suggest that any form of humour is objectively bad makes no real sense.

If you had said "I find programmer humor to be really cringey" you may well have received fewer negative reactions.

Reminder of what I wrote:

>outside of __our__ cringey humor, __we__ tend to be rather humorless and thin skinned

I appreciate you being constructive, but I thought the pronouns I used made it sufficiently clear that I consider myself as a part of this culture (and thus subject to the characterizations I made about programmer humor). Anyway, I do not mind the negative reactions, even though I may reply in disagreement.

Saying that you're part of the culture doesn't really remove the suggested universal negative, it just implies that you feel that you are part of that demographic.

The point I was going for was that I'd suggest that all humor is so subjective that it's impossible for a universal negative to apply.

In the same way that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, humour is in the ear of the listener.

Prefixing everything with "I think" or "I find it to be" is unreasonable. Of course it's subjective, and of course if someone says something is cringey, that's an opinion and it goes without saying.

Being a part of the group I was characterizing means my comment was not from some perceived position of superiority.

Anyway, I knew what I was getting myself into with that post.

well it's a view of the world that adding two words to a sentence is unreasonable, but (and this is just a suggestion) I think you'll find that you get less negative feedback if you make it clear when something is an opinion rather than a statement of fact.