Chris Gayomali

For a long time, Facebook operated under an incisive motto: "Move fast and break things." Acting on this mantra has a tendency to upset Facebook's change-averse user base -- and sometimes, Facebook doesn't even have to break anything.

Recently, New Scientist revealed that Facebook's data team manipulated the news feeds of 689,003 users for one week in January 2012. Using an algorithm, Facebook and researchers at Cornell University either removed all positive posts or all negative posts from a user's news feed.

The joint study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The Internet was not pleased. Even though the sample size was relatively small, Slate, for example, called the research "unethical."

Comments on Metafilter filled a spectrum ranging from "meh" to furious: "I don't remember volunteering to participate in this. If I had tried this in graduate school, the institutional review board would have crapped bricks."

According to ESPN, there were 1.7 million concurrent streams of the US-Germany World Cup match on its WatchESPN service. That crushes the previous high of 750,000 concurrent streams set by the last match between Mexico and Brazil.

Netflix’s streaming service's chief product officer, Neil Hunt, hinted at what the Netflix of the Future might look like. "Our vision is, you won't see a grid and you won't see a sea of titles," said Hunt.

It won't be able to magically pick the perfect movie for you. But there is a "powerful possibility" that future versions will present viewers with just three or four manageable choices at a time.

An internal report obtained by BuzzFeed reveals that the New York Times is, by admission of its own employees, struggling to adapt to a digital publishing landscape.

The Times's "Innovation Report," commissioned by chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and conducted by his son, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger (a journalist at the paper), reveals a newsroom "falling behind" in the "art and science of getting our journalism to readers."

The Times "has watched readership fall significantly." "Not only is the audience on our website shrinking," notes the report, "but our audience on our smartphone apps has dipped, an extremely worrying sign on a growing platform." Per BuzzFeed, the Times is getting trounced by savvier online competitors like the Huffington Post, which are leveraging the Times' reporting to generate traffic.