Basically, the soft fork didn't change anything. The soft fork stops Justin from performing actions on the network that the community doesn't agree with. That's all.
steemworld has been around for a long time, and before that it was steemd everyone had to use. In all the years I've been here, notifications are something that have never properly worked. At one point Steemit Inc basically just stopped them entirely, until recently both Steemit and steempeak got them properly implemented again. So I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few issues still.
Really though, consider steemworld, it allows so much depth into the statistics, who is voting, how much, earnings upcoming and gone by. It's a very good tool. It's basically a very good block explorer (every crypto has these, they're great for seeing what's happening in real time on the network).
Here's an example of some stats:
How would these help me find the small fellow content creators who have upvoted my post?
I know how to find out stats on anyone I want to. How do I find which of the upvotes on my post are from humans, and which are from bots. I did that before by looking at the percentage of a vote that they gave me. Now there is no way to tell unless they also comment.
There's a segment entirely for account operations (upvotes, downvotes, comments, and more). It shows vote percentage and vote value. They're displayed in real time, so no front-end steempeak or Steemit lag.
For example, you can see that I downvoted a ton of spam earlier, and received an upvote not long ago for a value of 0.03$ at 100% from a user. You can filter it to only see outgoing actions or only incoming ones. Check out the image:
OK that does seem useful thank you.