How does it work? A (very short) summary: it first scores all kinds of sources (such as scientific publishers) and then categorizes them into themes. The Syllabus works with about 60 themes, such as Tech & Cybersecurity and Arts & Culture . All themes for “people who want to understand the world”, just like Morozov himself.
To score content, Morozov uses “taxonomies”. These are the most important words, concepts, names and institutions within the themes. A kind of mind map or word cloud. If the content of a new article has many similarities with the taxonomy, it gets a high score in that theme.
Morozov and his team then manually assess the information for quality. An article that scores on the right words can still be a weak story. After this screening, the final selection is created that is distributed weekly among the subscribers.
Quality or popularity?
What do I find so interesting about The Syllabus? Morozov deliberately sets himself apart from whatsapp number list the usual way in which content and knowledge are distributed online: based on popularity. An article that is linked to a lot can score high in Google. A video with a lot of likes and shares will appear in your timeline. But what about the paper by a novice scientist that has not yet been cited? Or that great in-depth podcast with a small reach? Morozov states (in a comment below the article on De Correspondent ) that on platforms like Google, “relevance” has become a euphemism for popularity (or even power).