Reddit group WallStreetBets hits 6 million users overnight after a wild week of trading antics

• r/WallStreetBets has hit 6 million users, after gaining more than 1.5 million users overnight.
• The Reddit community caused a rally in games retailer GameStop's shares this week.
• The public has been captivated by a narrative of everyman traders vs Wall Street.

Reddit community r/WallStreetBets surged by more than 1.5 million users overnight to 6 million members on Friday, as newly minted day traders and meme lovers piled in to watch the fun.

According to $4, an unofficial site that measures subreddits' growth, r/WallStreetBets was the fastest-growing all week, increasing its members by more than 2 million over the last 7 days. The group started Thursday with 4.4 million members.

The community has been around since 2012, and began the year with a little above 1 million users.

That number has surged after the group's members bought shares in US video games retailer GameStop en masse, sending the price skyrocketing. The retailer's share price grew from just above $4 in January to a closing high of $347.51 on Wednesday.

That activity fueled $4 which had shorted the stock - essentially a bet that the stock price would go down. You can read $4. There has also been outrage as the trading apps r/WallStreetBets users are using to buy into the stock, such as Robinhood, experienced outages or $4.

Read more: Some GameStop store employees say they're getting investing questions from customers and they're in the dark about how to handle it>$4

As Insider's Ben Winck noted, r/WallStreetBets has done this kind of thing before, trading everything from $4 to $4.

Public attention spiked this week as r/WallStreetBets users who made a windfall this week posted stories - not all of which are verified - of being able to pay off debt or for medical care. While some r/WallStreetBets traders clearly have large pools of cash to burn, $4 has generated huge interest in the community.

Those piling into the subreddit may be in for a shock. As $4, the community has a "crass outer shell" whereby users refer to themselves as "retards" (an anagram of "traders") and "$4" and flood the group with nerdy memes.

Insider has approached the moderators of r/WallStreetBets for comment.

The group's founder, 39-year-old Jaime Rogozinski, has distanced himself from some of the activity, after one short-seller, Andrew Left, $4.

"It's a little like watching one of those horror films where you can see the bad guy slowly going up the stairs," Rogozinski told $4. "You see this train wreck happening in real time."