[TheSilentMan]

Also, I'm pretty sure pull requests wind up as notifications for anyone who is watching the repo, not just people listed as contributors.

Even if I'm wrong, comments on pull requests are certainly notifications for everyone who is watching the repo.

[bjeanes]

That's why starring was released https://github.com/blog/1204-notifications-stars

Watching is if you actually want to pay attention to activity as opposed to just bookmark something.

[mietek]

Notifications on GitHub are still too coarsely-grained to be useful.