I wish HN had a way to save a story without upvoting it or showing it publicly on your profile (the "favorite" feature implemented right now), like Reddit's "Save". Many times I'm interested in something to check out later but it's not something worth upvoting (like this story, based on other comments) and I want my interests to stay private.

This issue is better solved externally - using a bookmark manager. It would allow you to have all your "read later" links in one place rather than being scattered over different websites. Personally I use Safari's reading list feature for that.

Quite a few people were unhappy when twitter renamed "favorite" to "like" because they had used it as a bookmark and did not want to imply advocacy. Seems like both intents could be supported fairly easily.

I recommend Instapaper or Pocket. They’re cheap, but worth it

Right next to Star is Watch, which would be much more suitable towards that, no?

No, Watch emails you a bunch. Stars just show up in a list so you can find it later. That being said, public bookmarks always seemed weird to me. Why not just actually bookmark it with your browser? Not that it matters.

If you are using github app, it's less friction to star it than open the page in the browser window and bookmark it.

What's the benefit of using the app?

App provide better UI and UX for mobile devices. It's faster, easier to navigate (bottom navigation) and some features work in it which don't on the mobile site (I can't remember which views force desktop view).

GitHub added a "custom events" for Watch. You can for example only watch on new releases. You should maybe check it out!

That's still not the same as stars, it still emails you.

Why would it be the same? The purpose of "Watch" is to have a notification.

I know, that's what I'm saying. We were talking about stars and then you said I should look into Watches instead, but what I was saying is that I don't like watches because you get emails. Customizing which emails doesn't help with that. Apologies if I was confused about something.

If you've ever tried to use Watch as a bookmark, I feel like it's obvious why that is not a good solution

You may want to revise your judgement, GitHub added support to watch on "custom events", such as: new issues, new PRs, new releases, etc. You might want to try again.