Our history, measured: the Stolen Stuff Hawaii community, 2015 to today
Stolen Stuff Hawaii was founded on July 27, 2014. Plenty of organizations tell a founding story; ours can be checked. This is the community's growth as it was actually measured, from dated analytics exports generated along the way, with the spans nobody measured left as gaps rather than filled in. We state the record here as dates, spans, and proportions; the measurements themselves feed our own indicators rather than being republished.
October 2015: the two weeks the island noticed
The earliest export we hold is dated October 10, 2015. A second export sixteen days later showed the community had grown by roughly a third in about two weeks, the moment word of mouth took over. The same exports measured how members behaved: over 99% of posts drew a reaction or a comment, and post conversations routinely ran long, with a typical response arriving within hours.
2016: a community at scale
A third-party export covering March 2015 through September 2016 captured thousands of posts and an engaged audience in the tens of thousands, with nearly every post drawing interaction. The pattern that still defines the network was already set: island-scale attention on lost, stolen, and found.
2017 to 2021: the daily record
From July 13, 2017 a daily measurement record begins, and it has run ever since: day by day, what the community engaged with, dated and archived. Membership measured over that span grew to roughly one and a half times its 2017 starting point by mid-2021.
The gaps, stated plainly
Not every span was measured, and we do not pretend otherwise. Continuous membership history pauses after May 2021 (the platform stopped providing it), resuming as point-in-time measurements on export days in 2023, 2024, and January 2026, by which point the community had grown to roughly nine times its first dated snapshot. The engagement record has no 2022 export, so that year is absent rather than estimated. Where you see a gap in our charts, it means "not measured," never "zero."
From measurements to the Attention Index
Today that whole measured history rolls up into the SSH Community Attention Index, our own monthly descriptive indicator of what the islands actually watch, blended from engagement across every SSH channel, community reporting, and search activity on our own sites. Its all-time peak came in March 2026. We publish the index and its methodology; we do not republish any platform's analytics.
Why we publish this
The community layer of our area intelligence, what residents report and what the islands pay attention to, is only as credible as the network behind it. This page is that network's paper trail: a decade of dated, checkable measurement rather than a claim. Subscribers can explore the full record, including the index history and topic shares, on the SSH Signal page.