if you play low silver, your gold friends are probably gold V - IV which really isn't that much different from silver 3+
especially since your rank will weigh the level of your opponents down, so you're probably playing vs. people in s2 or s1 which IMO is the most cancerous place of all ranked
s1-s2 is BY FAR the hardest bracket I've been through, or at least the most frustrating.
Everyone in this bracket thinks they deserve gold and you can almost feel the pressure they put on themselves to get to gold. As such, they tilt quickly, flame hard, and have zero trust in their teammates and make dumb plays and rarely if ever listen to shotcalls.
Their laning is stuff, their mechanics are stuff, their rotations are stuff, their cs is stuff, their builds are questionable, and all it takes is for the enemy to be better in one of those areas and it sets off the tilt dominoes and you're pretty boned if you can't salvage morale/hard carry them.
It's the only part of low elo where imo the complaints about teammates sucking and games being harder than they should be are actually completely valid.
doubt it. when i queue with my gold friends in ranked i play so much better and usually go my typical 12/2ish. when i play normal i barely ever go bad
you probably aren't putting out enough pressure on objectives when you're playing solo. I know that gold players will put more (albeit still not enough) pressure on objectives than silver players will.
They probably also have better gank follow-up, better builds, more knowledge of champ, better mechanics, better decisions, etc.