“Unstar as interesting”

Question

If I starred something as interesting, would I unstar it as interesting or as uninteresting?

Answer 1

If I read "unstar as uninteresting," I would understand something was before starred as uninteresting; in the same way, I would understand "undelete as spam" as the opposite operation of "delete as spam."

Answer 2

I understand what you're getting at. You are asking whether it should be (unstar) (as uninteresting) or (un(star as interesting)). Since the adverb as XXX modifies the verb here (and the verb being unstar), it would be unstar as uninteresting.

This, of course, is assuming that the verb to unstar itself is acceptable.

Answer 3

I guess, "unstar" doesn't need clarifications such as "as interesting" or "as uninteresting" cause when you unstar something means you want to remove it from your favorite list. it can be interesting, uninteresting, boring or whatever.

Answer 4

If you allow for a distinction between uninteresting and not interested, you should probably "unstar - not interesting". It's not that you are calling it uninteresting, you are just changing your mind about calling it interesting.

Answer 5

This question is too vague. Even the "right" answer you've selected is wrong in many common contexts.

Since "star" isn't actually a verb, most of the answers here make assumptions about what context you might be in that would prompt you to pretend that "star" is a verb.

I assume that the OP is referring to the way star icons are commonly used on the internet to flag content as "bookmarked" or a "favourite" in various contexts, both privately and publicly.

The answer to your question would be different (and obvious) depending on the mechanics of the particular star system that you are describing.

Some examples..

1. You visit a site where you have two star icons that can be clicked on, one is accepted by the community to literally mean "interesting" and one means "uninteresting", along the lines of the up/down vote system used here on the stack exchange. In this situation, you can do all of the following:

   • "star as interesting" = clicking the star that signifies interest
   • "unstar as interesting" = clicking the star that signifies interest a second time, returning it to its default state
   • "star as uninteresting" = same as the first option, but on the "bad" star
   • "unstar as uninteresting" = same as the second option, but on the "bad" star

2. you visit a site that has a single star icon per item of content. Clicking the icon causes the user to be notified of future updates to that content. It is assumed that humans don't subscribe to content they don't find interesting. By counting the number of subscribers, we have a metric of "interestingness" of each item of content.

   End users think "this is interesting, i like this" and not in terms of subscription functionality, so the star icon has become a common way to prompt the user to subscribe to content, especially when the "interestingness" metric is designed to be public.

   in this case, "star as interesting" is an informal way of saying "star as it is interesting". You could then "unstar as uninteresting", to mean "unstar as it is uninteresting", but this is not the same as the literal meaning of "unstar as uninteresting" where you are removing a star that signifies "uninteresting" presented in the context of situation 1.

   You could theoretically "unstar as interesting", but it would be an illogical thing to do, unless you are a person who likes to subscribe only to uninteresting content.

3. You visit a site that has a 5-star style rating system. You can choose to "star" something as "boring, uninteresting, neutral, interesting, great".

   in this case, you can either have a null value, or "no answer", or a number of stars. You can both "star as interesting" or "star as uninteresting" but the site does not allow you to remove your vote once cast, so you can never "unstar" anything "as interesting" or "as uninteresting".