after one and a half years of playing ranked, I finally get to silver but I have encountered more feeders and trollers in silver than in bronze. wtf? i thought it was going to be a tad bit better. also, we're in silver yet my teammates still don't get the concept of warding.
Wait until you get to higher in silver and everything thinks they deserve to be gold but you are holding them back.... it only gets worse from here.
Silver isn't really different from Bronze, especially in Silver 4-5. Its mostly just people who are on their way to Bronze.
the problem is division 5. this division is a sinkhole for all those players who are worse than their rank but one time got lucky and made it there. because it is impossible to drop, but impossible to climb for them aswell, they dont give a shit about their games anymore.
if you climb to mid silver this should get better (well... then you have to deal with fresh lvl 30 account tho), and if you climb to gold 5 it gets worse again :D the worst ive seen was actually d5, because the difference between division 5 and 4 is higher than anywhere else, so you have to deal with an incredible amount of players who just gave up.
When I started like 2 years ago, I played through bronze and through silver. I gotta say that you're very much right and I think it's because people in silver think they're good because they're not bronze. Though bronze is bad, most people know that they're bronze and need to get better or do better (except for the oh so special challenjour players of course ;) ). Silver is rough though because you have the new to ranked players mixed with people who got placed there out of luck or fell because they're boosted, and the smurfs or elo boosters. Silver 5 is probably the worst part of silver because it's where these large variances in skill are seen every game.
Tbh, I think it's kinda like that each rank... bottom of the barrel at div 5, and then better as you go higher, then bottom of the barrel again XD
im a silver 2 and the game actually is harder than bronze because people think they really are better than they are. it really isnt much different than bronze at all. My biggest problem is i main adc but my secondary is mid I cant play both positions at once. If i go either of those roles i win lane about 90% of time, then the other lane either bot or mid tend to do poorly. Yesterday I had a mid 
who had less than 10k damage in a 30+ min game who fed the enemy 
. We won the game by a miraculous comeback but its annoying to have a mastery 7 who is in champ select oh GG ez game for us then does that and in game says im going to get him next time when syndra is 6/0/0 vs 0/6/0.
Many Silver 5 0 lp players are much more toxic And probably worse players than high bronze
It took you a year and a half to climb to silver?
I placed bronze 3 this season and climbed to silver 4 in just 3 months lol.
the problem with low Silver right now is that tons of new players (first timers) are placed in Silver (sometimes as high as Silver II for absolutely mediocre to bad play)
Silver is full of these "paratroopers" (they played ranked just for chills, get a Silver from promo, maybe play 5 more games than put ranked behind). Meanwhile you have the try hards who play 100s of games but who average out at the same rank as those guys. Hence, huge skill disparities.
I honestly don't get the reasoning since it doesn't take a genius to know that they'll be on a massive drop. If the system allowed it (more often) they'd drop to Bronze before having played enough games to have the POSSIBILITY of making a come back through what they've learned.
