I agree with the bits about how coding to gain watchers is silly, but I disagree about how people watching loads of stuff is bad. I follow interesting people, and my number one source of finding cool new things is looking at the stuff they follow. It has nothing to do with fanboyism, and everything to do with discovery
It's not that watching loads of stuff is bad, but that editing or messing with the feed of changes from those watched projects in a facebook way is bad.
I also find the social aspect of github useful for discovery and there could be some new useful features around that use. But certainly not by breaking the watch feature to optimize for passive bulk watching.
