Yep, that’s specifically the meaning :)

Golden = Made of gold

Gilded = Covered in a thin layer of gold

The gold and the thin layer was the 1%-ers, with rampant corruption and harsh conditions for everyone else.

A lot of the reviews that are for the “wrong item” are there because of the seller repurposing the listing.

The seller will list some item that is easy to get good reviews on, like a hammer or something. Then after they rack up several hundred 5* reviews saying “Works great, seems high quality!” they edit the listing to change the item title, description, everything to a new product but keep the reviews.

Then the new product gets a big boost from the high review count and star rating of the previous product.

Very scummy.

It’s a disaster out there right now when it comes to decent review sites.

Google is absolutely complicit in this, if not entirely to blame. Their search ranking has over the years pushed to the top all the low effort listicles that are full of sponsored Amazon links and no actual reviews, and a lot of the real reviews have disappeared due to traffic starvation.

And now those top sites are often just AI nonsense that steal content from whatever few other sites actually exist. Nonsense “reviews” just spouting the product specs, from people who have never even put their hands on the product for real.

My personal go to these days (although I wish it wasn’t) is youtube.

There’s still a load of nonsense listicles on youtube, but with a bit of searching you can usually find some actual person who is genuinely knowledgeable about the product category, and has a bunch of different ones actually in their possession for real, that they can compare and give honest opinions on.

Ohh yeah. I remember the tech news coverage of the cars being so easy to steal, just didn’t realise there was a “challenge” about it. Unbelievable Hyundai and Kia got away without immobilisers for so long. Really cheeky of them to cut that corner, and it backfired.

What the heck is that?

Probably everything will just go online. I imagine that is a big part of what killed Joann in the first place.

Truly, it’s the existential horror that really keeps me going :')

The batteries are for dipping

I used to be very much into My Little Pony when that whole thing was big, and there was a tremendous amount of very dark fan theorisation and spinoff material.

I think what you say is correct in part, that it can make things less shameful, but I also think there’s a simpler explanation - it’s fun.

It’s exactly because kids shows are so happy and non-threatening that these dark fan theories are so entertaining, because of the stark contrast between the theory and the source material. And so the darker it is, the better.

I mostly don’t think people “believe” the dark theories are true, or in any way actually intended as subtext by the showrunners. People aren’t “reading between the lines” so much as they are purely “making it up” - in ways that were never intended but feel somehow plausible. It’s just a bit of fun.

MLP itself was a strange case, though, and got quite bizarre in the end. As the show went on, the writers and animators became increasingly aware they had unexpectedly developed a huge adult following, and some of the plot points that began purely as fan theories later became canon… but that’s a whole different story…

If lasagna doesn’t have a layer of deliciously browned and bubbling cheese and crispy oven-pan edges, it’s dead to me.