Previously I considered writing in public in more or less personal terms. Is it a great way to look bad? What I concluded was that it is! However, the essential strengthening force of writing in public, psychologically speaking, is the inherent risk one takes. Accountable deliberation, which is to say deep thought in a nominally public setting, is dangerous but motivating.
So this is a tangible thing to hang on to. The poetry of it is this: you make yourself smarter and stronger by the potential embarrassment of revealing that you are neither. Richard Hamming's 'You and Your Research' (text) mentions a similar kind of ego-splotation, namely submitting important results in the abstract sent in advance to a conference, before actually achieving said results. It's an extreme measure! Without necessarily condoning it, this battle of the self with the ego has to be preferable to the notorious practice of cutthroat research professors: assigning two graduate students to the same project. Both are effective and inject a sense of urgency and accountability. Ethically of course, self- or ego-destruction must be preferable to collegiate collision courses.
Wrapped into this is the necessary evil of unpolished work. There is a sensibly high expectation of polish in final works in academia.
To be sure, there is a curve of polish-reward. Devils are in the details. In academic papers, little inconspicuous typos evolve into monstrous wrenches in the gears of reproducing results. However, extreme and meticulous detail must come at the cost of time and effort, which at a certain point must be stolen from more important tasks. This is the equipoise of doing anything well: tolerating your own inevitable mediocrity, but fiercely refusing to accept it.
In the present context, the moral is: to become better (at writing, thinking, at 'life', generally), it is equally important to be able to tolerate mediocrity as it is to incessantly strive against it.
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