It is very difficult to be able to give a facet of the problem that is illustrated here.

1. Self-voting is not necessarily an abuse.

Many people have invested their money in Steem and write good posts and posts a few times a week. But several of them do not get as good upvote back on their posts and then use their self-vote to earn some profit on the post. They vote for many little steemians to support them. When the small accounts give upvote back then it won't be much even though there may be several 100 votes left on a post.

Many people lease STEEMPOWER to give them more power to vote for others and they also vote for themselves. It is not an abuse for them to continue renting steempower based on the profits they can make

Circle voting is it an abuse?
Whether the 10 or 20 who just vote for each other and almost never outside their own ring is also not an abuse. It is their own small group and they choose this themselves. But if there are only dirt posts from everyone there will be milking and then there will be an abuse.

Circle voting, I myself have been accused of being part of such a group when downvotes got started in full. I still have many favorite authors that I vote for and they vote for me.
No one is going to tell me who to vote for or not, it's my own choice. When the downvote war went too full and I was close to zero for many of my posts I felt that I was no longer welcome and several with me were on their way to the end of the Steem community
But I have been here since July 2016 and fought for the small accounts in the community and it made me start fighting for them
My Voting CSI 21.6 (0.05% self, 626 upvotes, 182 accounts, last 7d) Most are upvote manually.
So I ask you to be careful when it comes to self-voting and Circle voting.

We are now seeing several of the old witnesses and some larger accounts are making nausea with self-indulgence on their own comments.
They are angry and will do anything to destroy as long as they have money for it here at Steem. I wish they got their money out and that we were then given an opportunity to see them end here for good.

To me, abuse is the one who steals other people's work, pictures, video and content and pretends to be their own. There are also some that use spinning from articles, that is, they change a bit in the way content is written. Should we hit it hard? yes we should, but first we have to give a warning and explain why. Because there are many who come here and go in that trap. I have many who have received a warning from me during my 4 years at Steem and at the same time I have given them a guide. Some of them are my friends on Steemit now.
The learning curve is long and everyone deserves a second chance before we cut off their heads.

One thing that is clear is that we do not have to issue massive red flags again, it will kill the platform. We lost many good writers when the war went on last time.

But we need Steemit, Inc. to take responsibility now until we have better solutions in place and society says yes to this as a temporary solution