My brain has always struggled to understand the purpose of stars in apps. Sometimes, in certain contexts, they make sense. Before hearts took over as the go-to metaphor, stars in social media-adjacent apps often served as icons that triggered actions such as liking a post, or marking a post as a “favorite.” Occasionally, in similar scenarios, I have seen star icons on buttons that mean “archive” or “save.” But then there are other times where stars don’t make sense with any of those meanings, but instead, simply serve as a way to mark a piece of content as “starred.” But what the hell does that mean?! And why might I even want to mark something as starred?
Finally, while using my favorite RSS reader (Newsflash), it dawned on me why they are legitimately useful. Sometimes, as I’m going through all the fresh news articles and blog posts that have been pulled in from my subscriptions, I’ll land on a post that I would really like to read, but that I don’t have time to read through at the moment. The only trouble is, opening it marks it as read, and if I navigate away, I’ll lose track of that post forever.
I lived with that limitation for a while, and then got to where I would at least open a post in web browser tab and leave that to come back to later. But then, in a real eureka! moment, it occurred to me: I can click the little star button and it will add it to the list of starred posts!
Suddenly, a world opened up to me. For posts that I want to return to later to give them the attention they deserve, I can mark them as starred. Later, when I have more time to focus, I can review my starred items, and go through them one at a time. Then, once I’m finished with a post, I can simply un-star it and it will disappear. With this workflow I can take my time with each individual post without worrying about that it will be prematurely marked as read, or otherwise buried in the pile of other posts in my feeds.
After all these years, I finally realized that the starred list is really a “you’re not finished with this” list, or a “read it later” list.
Using this workflow has vastly improved my experience using RSS readers, and I’ve started to apply that to other apps which feature the same mechanism. It’s a genuinely useful tool that I had been missing out on, and hopefully, this will help someone else understand their purpose faster than I figured it out.