Gamer here; ditto.
x ISWYDT 
The first obscure acronym I used was inspired by Unca Cece: EMWIGMT
And I use that a lot when talking politics. 
Well-played, sir.
SuperDreadnought, of course (ship class in David Weber’s Honorverse SF series)
Straight Dope (SD) is what I should have said.
Would you care to share? I tried Googling it, but couldn’t find anything.
Having recently finally had the chance to play “cwm”, I was hoping this was a new Scrabble word. 
Exactly the word I thought of when I said it could be pronounced.
This is pretty standard and makes good sense.
For the record, not all initializations are acronyms. An acronym are initials that form a “word”, like NATO or NASA. Initializations like SD, ATMB, IBM, ICBM, are not acronyms.
That said, I agree with the OP wholeheartedly.
iitywimwybmad?
I’m a little embarrassed to admit for the longest time, I thought QFT was an acronym for “Quite Fucking True” as opposed to “Quoted For Truth”.
Personally, I like my version better.
I got edible midgets weigh in, but I’m stuck for the rest. Probably gastro something.
I’m with the OP on this. And while I think 70% of the general population is too high a bar, 70% of your likely audience is probably about right. (You should have some sort of intuition about this, in a forum you spend a decent amount of time in.) And I’m sure FN/DPP would easily fail here.
More than half of them, I have no recollection of seeing in any context. These include NRN, LET, PRB, HTH (not counting the pool supply company; I’m familiar with them from way back), WFH (which means teleworking, who needs an acronym?), TLTR, OOO (we leave out-of-office automated email replies when we’re out, so kinda pointless), EOD (we use COB = close of business), EOW (=COB Friday), LMK, TYT. I guess these aren’t used around my office.
And the rest of them are pretty obvious if you’ve spent more than three months online. FYI and Y/N predate the Web by eons; IMO, BTW, FWIW, IDK, SFW - picked up all these in my first weeks on this board, if not during my first weeks with email an age ago.
I once read a rant about TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms). I should have figured it out by context, but eventually googled.
I’m totally with the OP on this. You’re either striving to be clear, and understood, or you’re just setting people up to ask, ‘please tell us, oh much smarter person than us, what does this mean?’
And it’s laughably transparent. Embarrassingly so. Like snobs throwing in some Latin, just because! The Economist, respected and internationally read, has the simple protocal previously mentioned, which they share we most publishers; first usage, spell it out with Capitals, after which abbreviate at will!
It’s simple, it’s elegant, and halfway through, if you should get confused, you can always refer back to earlier in the article for clarity.
It should be the standard, in my humble opinion.
For the most part, I agree with you, but I can’t agree with this line. It should be some majority of the audience. As a government contractor working in IT, acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations… they LOVE them. Hell, there’s phrases I use regularly where I have NO IDEA what the actual phrase is, but I know what it is in context. My previous job was as a military contractor in IT, and I think we’d have conversations where close to half the “words” are abbreviations of some sort. I’m also a gamer, though I’ve recently cut back, and a huge amount of the lingo there is various abbreviations too.
But I do see a large difference between using a common abbreviation that everyone knows, or one that the audience should be familiar with, and either making one up or using one that audience doesn’t know.
Today’s Pearls Before Swine is quite appropriate.
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Yeah, that’s been pretty much the guideline with journalistic publication, at least: use the full name on first reference and then the abbreviation/acronym on subsequent references. My AP Style guide does allow for some organizations to be abbreviated on first reference, like CIA, FBI, and NASA, but, in general, they should be spelled out first and even on additional references, urges writers and editors to be careful and avoid alphabet soup.
We could just stop using acronyms entirely and start typing the damn words out