A badge only upgrades — it never drops
A badge, once a post has earned it, only ever moves in one direction: up. It can climb from 🔥 Top 20% to ⭐ Top 10% if the post keeps performing, but it never drops back down and never disappears.
Each axis records the highest tier the post reached, not its current standing.
This matters because a post's live numbers keep moving as it's tracked. Views climb, the engagement ratio drifts.
If a badge followed the live number, a post could win one day and lose it the next. Instead the badge locks in the best that post ever did, so the winners vault stays stable — a winner you saw last week is still there this week.
Final for live tracking at day 30
Every tracked post runs to a day-30 finish (its last checkpoint — see a post's tracking life). At that point each axis's badge is final as far as tracking goes:
- A ⭐ or 🔥 badge stays exactly as it is.
- A post that finished an axis unbadged stays unbadged there — the weekly threshold move never reaches back to award it a badge.
- Only posts still in active tracking (before day 30) earn or upgrade a badge from a check-in.
So a post that finished tracking a while ago with no Engagement badge won't gain one because the profile's threshold shifted. That's deliberate: it stops old posts from randomly appearing in or vanishing from the vault long after they were published.
One thing does reach back: the calibration catch-up sweep. It runs when a pool draws its thresholds for the first time, when a profile is re-added, and whenever Huntit re-checks a pool — sweeping that axis over the profile's last year and badging whatever qualifies. Like every other path, it only ever adds.
The tooltip numbers are frozen (not the current views)
Hover a badge pill and the tooltip shows what the post beat — its value against the threshold it cleared (the line, in the tooltip's own words), and when. Those numbers are a snapshot from the moment the badge was earned, not the post's live metrics. This is intentional and often surprises people:
Top 10% reach for this profile. 14.0% of followers · the line was 5.8% Won 30 minutes after posting.
Compare that frozen value against the post's current view count and they won't match — the post has kept growing since.
The frozen number is the honest record of the win as it happened; the live counts sit in the post's metric strip.
On an upgrade from 🔥 to ⭐ the snapshot re-stamps to the upgrade moment, and so does the won date — which is why an old post can reappear among the vault's recent wins.
"Historical" badges
Some badges were stamped during the profile's calibration back-fill rather than through live tracking — for posts that were already performing when Huntit first collected them (see Calibrating · N of 30). Their tooltip closes "Won when we judged this profile's history, so the win time isn't known." instead of a time after posting — those posts were never watched live from launch.
The badge is just as real; only its provenance differs.