What is Cybergrunge.net?
A multimedia hosting service providing free web space for music, videos, artwork etc. It is a bit like the idea of a netlabel, but more freeform. Anyone can submit their work to share. The site is not a "clique", and all are encouraged to share freely. Any genre or style is fine, we don't mind archiving whatever odd digital detritus you have laying around, share away!
Why is Cybergrunge.net?
The goal is to carve out a small niche online for people to share their creative works. The Webmistresses of cybergrunge.net mainly come from a place of nostalgia and longing for the old web days of forums, handcrafted homepages, netlabels, IRC, internet directories etc.
Before the Web1.0/Dotcom Crash, the internet was filled with odd little sites like cybergrunge.net. Google used to not only have search results that were actually relevant, but had healthy competition from curated internet Directories and other search engines. Today, nearly 90% of internet traffic goes to just a dozen or less huge monopolies. We are encouraged constantly to Connect our account to Meta, Google, etc, and we mostly spend our time on those platforms. Gone is the "digital nomad", as we are tracked by cookies from site to site.
Before Web2.0, instead of huge tech monopolies pushing their platforms, the internet was a cozier place, a "global village" dotted with homepages and little communities. It was hard to navigate and accessibility wasn't what it should have been, but there is still something magical about stumbling across a little-known oasis of a website like this where some folks got together in a unique and more personalized space online.
No Algorithm
The site primarily encourages people to find random art and music. We do not have an algorithm and do not "rank" media according to how many clicks it gets etc.
You can view Random media items or view them chronologically or by name, thats as close to an algorithm as we get. We aren't interested in being a typical "platform" and basically going along with what we see as Payola 2.0 the way Bandcamp and Spotify operate.
In the original concept of Democracy, there was the idea of Rule By Lot (Stochocracy), which is the intentional use of random lottery as a tool of equality. Randomness is a powerful tool, used in divination by cultures since the dawn of time. Our current world instead operates using "artificial intelligence" - rigid sets of deterministic rules that, while good at producing profits for a few, comes at the detriment of the sponteneity and unexpectedness that makes life fun, surprising and interesting, and punishes anything or anyone who doesn't fit into the Matrix.