Does anyone here really watch any tags on the site?

I don't watch tags... the question traffic isn't large enough that tag filtering would be needed

Me neither, yet almost every tag seems to have some number of watchers

Do drive-by users just watch tags for fun?

Isn't there something related to tag watching that lets you get emails every time a new question in that tag is posted?

that would be terrible

I already get way more emails than I have time to read them

Well, people who are trying to build rep quickly through FGITW might like getting emails

(FGITW = Fastest Gun In The West - answering the easy questions before anybody else)

it's faster to keep looking at the badges on the favicon (or whatever that is called) than watching the email, reading the email and clicking the link

For fastest to camp on the homepage

Also, if you want rep, you can't just watch tags, you'll miss quite a few questions you can answer because they were mistagged or something

that's a problem too...

someone posts a docker networking question and tags it "php"

or sql injection question with "apache" tag, because the page happens to use apache as a httpd

You know it would be funny if one day there were two questions that were strangely related... "I found a flaw in foobar.php - can I access the filesystem through this?" "My logs show somebody sending weird data to foobar.php - what kind of attack is this?"