Over the years, I realized that people were using the distinction between read and unread articles to keep a list of articles they wanted to read later. I honestly never thought of it this way and I personally use the "favorite" articles as a way to list articles that I want to read later (but I realize that it's also a diversion of functionality).

The problem is that it's very easy to lose all its unread articles (there are two buttons, and the warning is regularly skipped :p). The "favorite" feature is less problematic but might not fit with all the use cases.

It would help a lot if people who don't mark all their articles as read regularly can explain what they try to achieve!