GitHub, you should have made it so any repo that you had watched previously remained watched AND starred.
It looks like everything is now starred but unwatched so no one will receive any updates on the feed anymore unless they manually go through all their repos and choose to watch them.
I think this is the behavior most people are going to prefer. It seems like it's pretty general to use "watch" for what is now a "Star" (i.e. something you find interesting but don't want updates from) so this will probably please the most users.
I mean I totally agree. Being able to favorite something without getting updates is great. I just think that changing the default behavior (aka coming to the site one day and having nothing new in your feed) is a little bit strange.
Strange, for you. A lot of us are unfortunately leechers (and there are more of us than yours). We don't (sadly) participate in big- (or medium-) sized projects and mostly do our own stuff and thus don't really care about specific commits in Node.js, homebrew or rails. When there's a new version we're excited and will use them, but the internal and day to day operation and progress of those projects are of little interest to us.
Yeah I know what you mean. It totally goes both ways. Perhaps giving the users an option during the upgrade then to keep the existing stuff watched or unwatched would have worked, but things like that are usually a slippery slope.
I think it's intentional. Many people watched repos to show support, but didn't really want the notifications. Hence, their notifications feeds filled up, and they never really looked at them.
For most people I reckon there aren't many no-push-rights repositories they'll need to re-watch.
It looks like everything is now starred but unwatched so no one will receive any updates on the feed anymore unless they manually go through all their repos and choose to watch them.