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Dmytry comments on Rationalist horoscopes: A low-hanging utility generator. - Less Wrong
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I think making it depend to the birthday is also rational. Otherwise there is more possibility of some sort of resource congestion if horoscope compels every user (rather than 1/12th of the users) to do same thing. This is not a big concern in the Internet with few thousands users spread all over the world - but imagine a small village, where there's just 1 horoscope, and it tells everyone to think about failure modes of their plans - they are all farmers, they all think what they're gonna do if crops fail, they all try to buy same equipment at same day.
one idea is to have 12 separate tumblr accounts, one for each zodiac sign, then the users subscribe to the tumblr account for their own zodiac sign.
I don't think there's any good reason to depend on birthday or actually follow the zodiac; it would be simpler to just have a few horoscopes for each day and show them randomly.
Actually, one interesting variation on this theme would be a website which keeps a database of all of the rationalist horoscopes, lets people get accounts and rate individual horoscopes by usefulness, and uses that information to predict which other ones that user would find the most useful. That would be a lot more helpful than going randomly or by birthday.
The basic idea can definitely be implemented in more sophisticated ways, though I'm not sure how quickly one would hit the point of diminishing returns.
At this point I think there's a clear advantage to having everyone using the same database; more feedback in the same place means we'll more quickly figure out how good the horoscopes are, so that the horoscope-choosing script is better calibrated and we have the data we need to know what kind of horoscopes we need to write more of.
The code as written does allow for several tumblrs to draw from and report to the same database, so if there's an advantage to having different people see different horoscopes even though each group has the same probability of seeing any given one, that can be implemented easily enough, but I'm not sure that's the case.
I suggested something like this in the interest checking post: http://lesswrong.com/lw/5rb/rationalist_horoscopes_lowhanging_utility/47i7
I hope that there will eventually be patterns of some people getting more benefit from some horoscopes than others, so that some information will fall out about mental habits and personalities.
12 groups is good, but why not let people sort themselves into groups of similar personalities & needs, so their votes will be more relevant to others in the group.
If dividing by 12 would mean too few votes per group, make them overlap. So if your sign was (for example) Slytherins for Sunshine, your votes would affect 3 Slytherin signs & 4 Sunny signs (double for the combination), but not the other 6.