And then even so if our vote isn't large then what is it gonna do to a highly voted post? Nothing... except make us an enemy?

Alone it won't do much, but if 100 dolphins use their 1 out of 2.5 free downvotes on that post there's no way the bid bot abuser is going to attempt to retaliate everyone, he can retaliate 1-2-3 people and how hard will it be for the others involved in the downvoting to counter the damage? This HF will only succeed if we all band together and downvote things that truly don't deserve the rewards they've gotten or bought their trending spot for.

If no one else is downvoting then what is it that they know that I don't?

No one is downvoting nowadays, there's barely any going cause most are just concerned with growing in stake through curation rewards so of course you don't see downvotes often today. That will hopefully change with the HF and normalize them a lot more though.

Of course warnings are nice "hey, do you really think you needed to buy votes from 5 different bid bots for this content?" and if they continue being the zaku or cbhartist who apparently can't get enough of the attention or are just using bid bots to somehow profit (who knows what's going on behind the scenes) then you'd move onto warning #2 which is a downvote and who knows maybe that'll create a chain reaction of other downvotes and the author will understand that in order to deserve that #2 trending spot they'll have to either try with better writing or content again.

The weird part today is that even if someone were to bid bot something super illegal/bad without every bid bot owner being made aware and removing the votes we wouldn't even have the power as a whole fucking community to downvote it. That's how much stake is locked up in bid bots.

Funny you mention steemmonsters cause I mentioned that zaku who promotes his SM tournaments before I read your comment all the way through.

I have nothing against people not using their downvotes or being the first to downvote something out of fear of retaliation, but they have to understand that them using their daily downvotes on legitimate content that deserves them to make trending and the use of bid bots better, the more they are going to be rewarded back from the rewardspool and long term as well for keeping this place clean. I am hopeful that many will become more active with their downvotes especially if they see many others on certain posts already - not trying to encourage ganging up on certain users but if it's done on actual shit posts then where's the harm in that.

I do expect there to come forward downvote guilds where you can let them use your downvotes with steemauto or the wise protocol and there may be some random retaliation going on as well but hopefully there will be some counter retaliation guilds coming up too. I know I'd delegate to something like that when I am in the position to, at least.

Sorry to get back to your comment so late, a lot of comments in here that caught me by surprise and had to find the time to reply.