You won't get any notifications from Steemit itself. But, thankfully, we have a ton of different dapps that have been created to make our user experience better.
Once you start getting to know this one I'm about to give you, you will have a much better Steem-experience!

https://steemworld.org/@craigcampbell

I always haven an open tab, and nowadays you can do about anything via steemworld. If you use discord, let me know so I can give you a link to Ginabot then you get instant notifications of comments/payouts/votes :)