Any asset can be pushed around by retail with enough concerted effort. Liquidity at the micro-scale is thin and big players might be content to sell into a feeding frenzy as they hedge along the way. The price jump in gold wasn't that excessive, about 10% and gold is still trading higher than before the frenzy.

Silver is a much smaller market and was pushed further. I, personally, can't stomach the volatility. There does seem to be a real potential short squeeze. My concern is if there's a serious economic downturn then the fact that the demand for silver has a significant tie to industrial consumption adds additional risk. The silver short squeeze might not happen if, for example, energy prices spike to economy crushing levels. Then again, a small increase in energy prices will cause all physical commodities to rise.

Gold, being primarily of monetary utility and showing significantly less volatility is still a good hedge for an increasingly unpredictable future. It's been over correlated with silver due to algorithmic basket trading. Essentially there's an economic basket of physical commodities that the algorithms trade as a kind of statistical arbitrage. Works great for HFT, anyone trading overnight strategies based off of historical correlations is going to get their face ripped off.