Gold barbs are the extroverts of the barb family — brassy, busy, always first to the food and first to investigate anything new with their mouths. That personality is exactly what a shrimp colony cannot live with. A gold barb grows to a solid three inches, hunts by sight, and treats the bottom and the planting as a buffet to be worked through; shrimplets simply vanish, and adult cherry shrimp are chased, nipped at moulting and steadily worn down until the colony collapses.
Why feeding them well does not fix it
Owners often hope a generous feeding routine will buy safety for smaller tankmates, and with gold barbs it does not, because the behaviour is investigation, not hunger. A barb tests the world by tasting it — new plants get nibbled, snails get prodded, a soft freshly-moulted shrimp gets eaten. Large amano shrimp sometimes hold their own through sheer size and wariness, and keepers do occasionally maintain them together, but it is a truce with casualties, not a community. The honest stocking answer: gold barbs and an ornamental shrimp colony are two tanks, not one. Let the barbs have robust, fast tankmates of their own scale and keep the shrimp somewhere calmer. Their rooting makes it worse. Gold barbs work the substrate and the base of plants as they forage, nosing into exactly the low cover where moulting shrimp hide, so even a shrimp the barbs never actively chase lives under constant disturbance. A moult interrupted is a shrimp lost, and in a barb tank the interruptions never really stop — the fish are active from lights-on to lights-out, and dawn finds them hungry and already searching.
Snails, though, are genuinely fine
The snail half of the question earns a clear yes. Gold barbs will nose at a snail, may investigate a mystery snail's antennae once and lose interest, and cannot do anything about shell — nerites, mystery snails and ramshorns all live unmolested in barb tanks, grazing algae while the barbs work the mid-water. Trumpet snails in the substrate are equally untouched. That contrast is the whole answer in miniature: anything with a shell passes, anything soft and bite-sized does not, and gold barbs are honest enough to make the rule easy to read. If the goal is a lively, low-maintenance crew of fish plus snails, this pairing asks nothing special beyond the barbs' usual terms.
Give them numbers and room
Gold barbs kept singly or in pairs turn their energy on their tankmates and earn the family reputation for fin-nipping; in a group of six or more, in a tank long enough to cruise, they aim that energy at each other in harmless display and become the cheerful, hardy school they are famous as. They also tolerate cooler water than most tropicals, which suits unheated snail setups in mild rooms. Record this tank plainly in KinsLe's Family Sharing as a no-shrimp aquarium, because gold barbs are precisely the fish a helpful relative adds a bag of cherry shrimp to — colourful, tempting, and gone by morning.