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for some reason, the irrational belief that nobody will read my shortforms paradoxically makes them much easier to write. if I'm writing something polished that i think lots of people will read, then i get scared that people will see it and think less of.me or something, which manifests as unreasonable perfectionism and a desire to present a fictitious version of myself and my thinking. i wonder if there is some way to get the best of both worlds - to produce more authentic but also high quality widely read posts
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Write it as shortform, then at the last moment change your mind and post it as article. It sounds stupid but it works for me.
(It does not have to be literally the last moment, but when you already wrote enough, you see how it will end, and you can continue writing without losing the momentum.)
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One possible approach would be having someone else polish the posts for you/work iteratively on ideas with a friend. Writing partners are useful! Not only do they divorce you from some of the reputational risk of writing whatever you're writing, they also turn the worst part of writing into a non-issue (the mental context switch between generating and polishing). There's also the concept of beta readers, but that admittedly feels a bit sillier for web forum posts. Just being able to offload the mental work of perfection into a "good enough" of "$person i trust thought it was good actually so it's fine" does a lot for improving speed of iteration, usually without meaningfully degrading quality in a noticeable fashion.