It was the successful fight to block SOPA/PIPA, above all, that gave Reddit the seductive sheen of influence Lofgren is now trying to harness—with others sure to follow. The disparate community had for one powerful instant closed the gap that is the bane of successful online agitation, between freewheeling umbrage and targeted anger. Combining an unrelenting stream of outrage and one big publicity stunt—the blackout, which Wikipedia joined—Reddit helped force lawmakers to back down from legislation whose supporters outspent Reddit allies 13 to 1. It was everything every political rabble-rouser with Internet stars in his eyes had ever imagined: a bitching-and-clicking campaign organized and sustained enough to actually work, rather than just make noise.

Lofgren, a staunch Reddit ally in the SOPA/PIPA fight, is now making an open attempt to spark that little-D democratic magic for an actionable priority. But it’s not going so hot. Where the mere mention of SOPA/PIPA was enough to inspire complaints in the thousands, in one day a sitting congresswoman’s call for legislative brainstorming has elicited almost no momentum and a tepid ninety or so comments—about a third of what a decent cat GIF can garner in the same period of time. Part of problem is that her cause doesn’t have the same sex appeal as fighting SOPA. Yes, Lofgren’s bill would make it harder for the government to shut down websites suspected of copyright infringement, but it’s not as easily reducible. She doesn’t have the benefit of being able to point to a popular website that will cease to exist tomorrow if no one rallies to her cause. SOPA allies did. It’s easier, moreover, to freak out than to be proactive, thinking through the arcane legal rights websites should have when they run afoul of the law. Still, Lofgren’s legislation ought to be highly attractive to the anti-SOPA set. It would place time-consuming legal burdens on law enforcement officials looking to seize websites where users might share copyrighted images or pirated Game of Thrones episodes, actions which in Reddit-speak constitute “freedom of the Internet.”

But Redditors responded more to the news of Lofgren's effort than to the effort itself. While her actual post garnered only a few useful comments and some 400 upvotes—a show of approval akin to a "like" on Facebook or a retweet on Twitter—an article from tech site CNET about the impending post was upvoted more than 2,000 times. This is the ultimate sign of what holds Reddit back—not the creeps or bathroom humor, but the fact that a preponderance of its users are more enamored of the attention their bouts of seriousness attract than are willing to act on that seriousness. There was no shortage of users basking in the news of their high-profile supplicant, but asked by Lofgren for ideas, and Reddit blew it. Where users have pushed their peers to take action beyond upvoting, rarely more than a few do so. Take the Reddit-created Test PAC: after its highly publicized launch, the super PAC was mostly inactive during the election. What’s more, it chose as its mission a pipe dream: unseating SOPA sponsor Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican in a safe-as-can-be seat.

Even at the height of the SOPA/PIPA campaign, the limits of Reddit’s activism were obvious. “Are you guys REALLY contacting your Senators?” asked IWorkForASenator. “Not from what I’m seeing.” Tellingly, most of the responses to the post were either entreaties for Redditors to do the actual work of making phone calls. For the organization of in-person anti-SOPA protests, Reddit largely relied on tech meetup groups and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.