If you’ve spent any time in AI roleplay communities lately, you’ve probably noticed the mood. Threads about characters forgetting everything, filters killing scenes mid-story, and beloved models quietly disappearing overnight have become the default conversation. It’s not just vibes. The data now backs it up.

61% of AI roleplay users say platforms got worse this year, according to a Reddit survey in 2026. Here’s what’s really happening with censorship, model downgrades, memory paywalls, and how to still have a good experience.

The Survey: “Everything Good Is Dying”

The clearest snapshot comes from the 2026 annual survey of the r/CharacterAIrunaways community, compiled by u/loamy under the fittingly dramatic title “Everything Good Is Dying.” The headline number: 61% of respondents say AI character chat platforms got worse over the past year, compared to just 21% who say they got better. “Much worse” was the single most-chosen answer in the entire survey, beating every optimistic option combined. That’s a 3-to-1 margin of dissatisfaction from some of the most dedicated users in the hobby; two-thirds of respondents have been roleplaying with AI for more than two years, and nearly 80% build their own characters.

A few other findings stand out. Character AI managed the dubious feat of being simultaneously the most-used platform, the most-quit platform, and the most frequently named “worst platform”: users describe staying only because migrating means abandoning long-running stories. Memory was the most demanded feature by far, with 63% of respondents putting it in their top three, and “a memory paywall” was one user’s complete answer to the question of the industry’s single biggest problem. Age verification alone accounted for 17% of all platform quits. And 59% of respondents now say they would never pay for an AI chat platform at all, up sharply from the year before.

Perhaps the most telling finding: when asked what would make them recommend a platform, users didn’t describe a better product. They described an older one. “Similar to old c.ai.” “Bring the old chat models back.” The most requested feature in AI roleplay right now is, essentially, a time machine to 2023.

Things that are getting worse

Independent of any single survey, the broader pattern across the industry is easy to verify. Content filters on major platforms tightened steadily through 2025 and into 2026, with users reporting chats interrupted mid-scene and characters breaking persona to deliver safety disclaimers even for mild scenes. Paying subscribers still complain that the narratives they subscribed to explore keep getting narrowed after the fact. While most users are not looking for plots that are insanely out of the norm, false positives of the content filter is annoying to a point that it breaks the immersive AI roleplay experience. For example, the popular genre of school bullies is a way for many users to heal from past experiences, and yet such content can be filtered heavily at both creation time and real-time generation.

Then came the identity checks. Age verification is now a legal requirement in a growing list of jurisdictions: Australia’s Online Safety Act codes and Brazil’s Digital ECA both took effect in early 2026, the UK’s Online Safety Act arrived earlier, and dozens of bills targeting AI chatbots are moving through US state legislatures. Platforms genuinely have little choice, since fines run into the tens of millions. But the rollout has been messy, and users’ privacy fears haven’t exactly been soothed by real-world incidents: a third-party verification vendor for a major chat app leaked roughly 70,000 government IDs in a 2025 breach, and researchers later found another major verification vendor’s codebase exposed on a public server. For many roleplayers including me, handing over a face scan to write fiction is simply a dealbreaker.

Model quality complaints follow a similar arc. The most dramatic case was Character.AI’s removal of its legacy chat models in May 2026, reportedly for cost reasons, replaced by a newer architecture that longtime users describe as forgetful, repetitive, and out of character. Meanwhile, platforms shipped image generation, video generation, and voice features that, per the survey, 54% of users say they’d never touch, reading them instead as money diverted away from the core chat experience. Elsewhere in the industry, users report shorter responses, mid-conversation ads, aggressive upsell prompts, and essential features like long-term memory moving behind subscriptions.

So Why Is This Happening?

No single villain explains all of it. A few forces are converging at once.

1. The economics stopped working

Running large language models at roleplay scale is genuinely expensive, and roleplayers are marathon users who send thousands of messages while, as the survey confirmsm, mostly refusing to pay. When investor patience runs out, platforms respond predictably: swap premium models for cheaper ones, cap context length, insert ads, and paywall memory. Users experience this as betrayal; companies experience it as survival. Both can be true.

2. Regulation changed the game

The era of anonymous, unmoderated AI chat is ending by law, not by choice. Age verification mandates, child-safety legislation, and app store policies all push platforms toward stricter filters and identity checks. Even platforms philosophically opposed to identity verification have publicly said they’re implementing it because they must. Restriction, in many cases, is compliance wearing a product update’s clothing.

3. Optimizing for the wrong scoreboard

The companies training today’s frontier models are chasing the money, and the money is in productivity: coding, business analysis, customer support, document drafting. So models are tuned to be agreeable, helpful, and safe. It’s ideal for writing your quarterly report, terrible for a villain who’s supposed to stay menacing. Creative roleplay is an afterthought in the training pipeline, and it shows.

4. We have higher expectations

Here’s the uncomfortable one. By most objective measures, the industry has improved enormously: context windows, prose quality, character adherence, and tools like lorebooks and personas would have seemed miraculous in the old days. I remember Character AI’s early versions had clean prose without walls of asterisk-wrapped narration, while later models produce short replies with misspelled words and random formatting. Today, the novelty that carried a mediocre reply is gone; after thousands of hours, you spot the formula in the first paragraph, and your bar is no longer “a computer wrote back” but “did this surprise me and remember three weeks ago.” Nostalgia sharpens the contrast, as the beloved old Roar models are remembered at their best, not their average.

How to Actually Have a Good Experience Going Forward

None of this means AI roleplay is doomed. It means the era of trusting one platform to stay good forever is over. A few practical adjustments go a long way.

Never keep your whole world in one snowglobe. The survey’s most sobering insight is that half the community uses exactly one platform, not out of loyalty but because their stories are trapped there. Keep your own backup of character definitions, personas, and key story summaries in a plain document outside any app. If a platform supports portable character cards, use them. When the next rug-pull comes, you can migrate in an afternoon instead of starting from zero.

Consider owning your stack. Bring-your-own-key setups and open-source frontends have a steeper learning curve, but they decouple your hobby from any single company’s business decisions. You choose the model, you control the filters, and nobody can delete your favorite model out from under you. If full self-hosting feels like too much, platforms that let you plug in your own API key are a solid middle ground.

Manage memory yourself instead of hoping the AI will. Long-term memory is still the weakest link everywhere. Periodically summarize your story’s key events, relationships, and character development, and feed that summary back in via lorebooks, author’s notes, pinned memories, or simply pasting a recap. Users who do this report dramatically more consistent long-form stories than those who rely on the platform’s memory alone.

Write like a partner, not an audience. The quality of what you get back tracks the quality of what you put in. Short, passive messages produce generic replies; specific actions, emotional detail, and unexpected choices give the model something to react to. Edit or regenerate weak replies early rather than letting bad patterns calcify into the conversation.

Vet platforms by their developers, not their feature lists. Across the survey, the platforms earning genuine loyalty weren’t the ones with the flashiest features. They were the ones with responsive developers, honest pricing, and a track record of not yanking things away. Before investing months of story into a new platform, look at how its team communicates, how it handled its last controversy, and whether its privacy policy seems like more than decoration.

Protect your privacy and your headspace. Be deliberate about what personal information you attach to your most personal writing, and be honest with yourself about when a session stops being fun. Rotating between AI roleplay, human roleplay, and your own solo writing keeps the novelty alive.

The frustration in the community is legitimate, and 61% is not a number any industry should shrug off. But the users having the best experiences right now aren’t the ones waiting for 2023 to come back. They’re the ones who stopped renting their creative worlds and started owning them.