Tumblr also has an "ask" field which could be used for sending in suggestions as well... though there'd have to be someone on wheat / chaff duty, and expecting a good deal of chaff.
Having the system require ongoing maintenance in order to have any output at all is a weakness. Also, having hand-submitted 'horoscopes' posted in order, as tumblr's submission function does by default, removes the randomness element and makes it much harder to include older concepts. It might work, but it wouldn't be all that much better than just keeping an eye on the new posts here, I expect.
My idea is to have tumblr just serve as an output system, and have a separate program that procedurally generates horoscopes from a list of sentences and then use email publishing or something to post them. That way it only needs attention when new things are going to be added to the list, rather than every few days.
As for rebranding...
I like "Actually Useful Horoscopes", if we're keeping the term 'horoscopes' at all.
P.S. Do tumblr rss feeds work properly for you? I'm subscribed to ~one but it spams me with updates when all that's changing is the number of comments/reposts. Am I doin' it wrong?
Yeah, I've never had a problem with it... are you sure you're using the right feed url? It'll be something like http://example.tumblr.com/rss
All right, this finally spiked my "just fix the rss thing" action potential, so thanks for that.
I like "Actually Useful Horoscopes", if we're keeping the term 'horoscopes' at all.
My reasoning is that "horoscope" is mostly there to anchor the idea to something people "get" already. It could be something like "Rationality Bites", I guess, ("Sensible Bites"? :) ) but there isn't really a "space" carved out for that in most peoples' brains. Maybe something like a secular equivalent to &...
(5:29:23 PM) Adelene: ...horoscopes are for people who, like [mutual friend], prefer to have an authority tell them what to do. *blink*
(5:30:18 PM) Alicorn: *blink*
(5:30:50 PM) Adelene: This is an observation that my brain made just now, but it seems to make a fair bit of sense.
(5:31:18 PM) Alicorn: Plausible.
(5:32:21 PM) Adelene: Especially given that horoscopes seem not to actually make predictions about the future: They say 'X is a good thing to do today', not 'X will happen today'.
(5:32:36 PM) Alicorn: *nod*
(5:32:53 PM) Adelene: ...rationalist horoscopes?
(5:33:07 PM) Alicorn: like what?
(5:33:33 PM) Adelene: "Focus on granularizing your goals this week."
(5:33:43 PM) Alicorn: hmm
(5:34:09 PM) Alicorn: divided according to some mechanism like star sign, or no?
(5:34:38 PM) Adelene: The only advantage I see to that is that it may make it more emotionally plausible.
(5:35:06 PM) Adelene: There may be some other advantage to having different people doing different things at any given time tho.
(5:35:23 PM) Alicorn: According to [other friend], birth *season* has empirically interesting effects in a few areas...
(5:36:35 PM) Adelene: I don't think we can cash that out very well into advice, and anyway I expect that having that close of a similarity with actual horoscopes is likely to provoke a memetic immune response for most people. Could do it based on some kind of personality test tho.
(5:36:50 PM) Alicorn: *nod*
(5:39:08 PM) Adelene: Really, I think the bulk of the utility of such a thing would be in giving people generally-useful cues to work from - having any given day's horoscope (or whatever we'd call it) be randomly picked from a set of good ones that haven't been used recently should be just fine.
(5:39:15 PM) Alicorn: *nod*
(5:40:00 PM) Adelene: Maybe pair it with a rationality quote of the day, too.
(5:40:10 PM) Alicorn: Yessss.
I know it's a silly idea, but it seems like it might be useful. I've played with random quote dispensers in the past, and if they have a good list of quotes to start with they can be surprisingly useful, in my experience - the quote might be useless 9 times out of 10, but that tenth time, when it makes you realize that a connection exists that you never would have noticed otherwise, is pretty awesome. Something like a daily horoscope might have a similar effect, but in a more practical way, getting people to consider taking actions in contexts where they wouldn't usually consider those actions and occasionally finding an unusually good, but not intuitively obvious, match. And that's on top of any benefits that such a system would have for people who do work better when they're told what to do.
Thoughts?