huliwood. Head count

Which of your posts broke out?

Every post a pane of glass. The ones that got far more likes than the posts around them stay lit, so an early hit counts as much as a new one.

Or try one: Lenny’s Newsletter, Experimental History, One Useful Thing.

Example: Huliwood

Huliwood, drawn as a head: 91 posts, one tile each, as big as the post is long; the one that broke out is lit.Huliwood91 posts · since April 2023

91 posts since April 2023, 82,000 words: about the length of a novel. A pane is as big as its post is long; each colour is a year, the oldest at the neck. Lit: the one that broke out, in gold.

  • 2026 41 posts
  • 2025 16 posts
  • 2024 22 posts
  • 2023 12 posts

Breakouts

Huliwood

1

of Huliwood’s 91 posts broke out.

Here that takes 2.7 times the likes of the posts around it, and 10 likes at least. This one, in gold: “Contigo Hasta el Fin del Mundo”, with 10 likes where a typical post around it got 3.5.

The last
The gold one, February 2026, 33 posts ago.
Length
Long and short posts get about the same likes.
Head count huliwood.com/head

How it decides

Likes are the hearts a post has on Substack, and they grow with a list: last month’s post went to more readers than one from your first year. So each post is set against the eight published around it, and a typical one of those eight (their median) is its yardstick.

Posts go up and down anyway, and on some archives far more than on others: on one, half the posts land within 30% of their yardstick; on another, within 85%. So the line is set by each archive’s own ups and downs, where they would carry only 1 post in 100 past it, and never under twice the yardstick or over five times: on a steady archive it is about two and a half times, and five times the posts around it is a hit on any archive. A breakout also needs 10 likes, since 3 likes against 1 is a good week, not a breakout.

“Then and now” is a typical post among the first ten against one among the last ten, leaving out the last two weeks, whose likes are still coming in; it shows only once one side reaches 10 likes. The words are Substack’s own counts, a novel taken as 90,000.

Free and paid posts reach different readers, so each is set against its own kind. A publication with several writers is judged on its own author, or on the writer with the most posts when the author signs fewer than half as many, since a writer with a bigger or smaller following would pass for a hit or a miss. Podcasts, threads (Substack’s own, and posts named as open or discussion threads) and posts under 100 words stay out of it; they are still in the head.

Length is measured the same way, the posts over the middle length against the ones under it, with whichever of free and paid you publish more of. “About the same” means a gap under 1.1 times, or one that more than one in twenty random splits of the same posts also show; “a few more” is a real gap under 1.25 times. It takes 30 posts with likes.

The archive is read from Substack’s public pages when you ask, and the answers are kept for about an hour (a publication’s name for six), so a shared link does not read it all again. Nothing about you, the one reading this, is stored. Archives longer than 1,000 posts are drawn from the newest 1,000.