feels like every "novel natural thing you eat that does Something" gets dumped in one big internet bucket — mad honey, mushroom gummies, all of it. theyre wildly different but the algorithm and the listicles treat them as one trend. and "mushroom gummies" itself is like three totally different things wearing one name, so its messy from the start
its a discoverability move. sellers tag into whatever bucket is trending to ride the search traffic. "as seen in the same roundup as" is basically free reach, accuracy optional
and mushroom gummies is the worst possible thing to get lumped WITH. that one label covers the boring functional kind, the legal-grey kind, and the actually-psychoactive kind. so now people map all that ambiguity onto honey too
the lumping also lets a listing borrow a whole category's implied claims without making any itself. sit beside "calm" "focus" "trip" products in one roundup and readers transfer those promises over for free. nobody had to claim anything
the venn diagram these articles draw is just one circle labelled "weird stuff for the algorithm" 😅