The worst that can happen is nothing

If you’re genuinely seeking the truth and you put something crappy into the world, nothing happens. There is no punishment for crappy content. It’s one of the simplest and most profound facts of conducting creative intellectual work on the internet. If you make something good or important, there’s some probability above zero that good things will happen to you. If you make something genuinely stupid, useless, or “cringe” — people ignore it and then forget it.

The fear of some imaginary punishment for failure blocks many unique intellectual trajectories from ever taking off. In almost every case, the fear is completely within the person’s own mind: “If I make content and it’s crappy, people will think I am dumb.” But the truth is they won’t, because “people” will never see it. “People” don’t read or watch anything for more than 3 seconds if they judge it to be crappy. If it’s truly crappy, people won’t pay enough attention to formulate the thought, “this is crappy.” And they certainly won’t bother to share it with disapproval, because crappy content is not worth attacking! Ironically, if someone shares your work to tell others that it’s crappy, this almost certainly means there is at least something good and important hiding within it.

If you search for “Based Deleuze” on Twitter, the overwhelming majority of tweets are making fun of it in some way. Yet it has sold well for a modest fringe philosophy book; I’ve heard a lot of positive feedback privately; it’s on Libgen and Aaaaarg (pirate sites); and many of the people who find it so crappy seem to be actually reading it and sharing their takes with others. Do you know how few people actually read theory books, let alone meme about them? It turns out that people calling your content crappy starts to happen right when you're finally getting real traction.

Having your weaker content ignored and forgotten is not a punishment or cost of failure, it is literally the absence of punishments and costs. As soon as you realize there is no punishment for bad content, your list of content ideas will expand dramatically and suddenly. Your motivation for trying them will increase. Some will be good, most will be bad, but when you experience the results first-hand (instead of taking my word for it), then you’ll really be off to the races.