Crocker's Rules strikes me as something someone thought was a good idea based on some sort of first principles reasoning more than trying to improve actual social interactions after lots of observation and experiment.
Declaring the Rules has been around for at least ten years. How many cases have there been where declaring the Rules has led to an useful social interaction that otherwise would not have taken place?
Or to turn this around, any way to guesstimate the amount of useful social interaction, which requires both someone having useful new information to provide and the recipient being actually able to receive and use the information, that gets lost due to politeness? And what about the interactions that end up noise from the "honest talk" being redundant or otherwise not useful, that do not get made due to politeness norms?
Random and anonymous commenters seem to already do the speaking their mind thing very well even when Crocker's Rules are not declared, and their input is mostly noise.
Recently I've been considering declaring Crocker's Rules. The wiki page and source document don't suggest any particular time limit or training period, and also don't provide any empirical results of testing it, positive or negative. It sounds good in theory, but how does it affect people in the real world?
It seems like an "obviously cool" idea but the risk to one's reputation is worth taking into consideration. If it is clear that the risk is low, and if the value to be gained is clearly very high, we should probably be doing more to encourage it as an explicit norm.
On the other hand, if it is just one of those ideas that sounds better in theory than it is in practice (because the theory does not correctly model reality), or is just yet another signaling game with a net negative value, that is worth knowing as well.
I haven't seen anyone argue against Crocker's Rules or claim it ruined their life, so my estimation is that the risk is low (although there is a small sample size to start with). Also, I have seen at least one statement from lukeprog implying that it has been instrumental in triggering updates during live conversations he has observed, indicating that the value is high (though its causal role is not firmly established in that example).
Does anyone have further data points to add?