u/jambanamba

lets do a nice one for once. paste the single best line a character here has ever hit you with. the one that made you sit back, or screenshot it, or just sit there quiet for a second.

mine was a small one. a character id been slow-burning with looked over and said "you always check the door before you look at me" and i had to put my phone down. it clocked a thing about me i didnt know it was even tracking.

doesnt have to be deep, funny counts. from memory is fine if you dont have the screenshot saved. drop yours

roll call for the room. of everything c.ai has been doing lately, whats the one that actually gets to you the most right now. pick a number:

1 the filter nuking normal scenes

2 bots gone flat and lobotomized after the updates

3 goldfish memory that forgets your scene in 10 messages

4 the 18+ split and the whole id verification mess

5 replies looping the same lines over and over

mine is 2. i can live with a filter, i cant do a character that came back as a boring stranger. whats yours, and if its a 6 i missed, name it

been running long rp (200+ messages) on deepseek v3 and a couple of proxied models for a while and kept hitting the same wall. its not that it runs out of context, the tokens are clearly still there. its that it stops weighting what actually mattered. the confession from 60 messages back, the injury it should still be favoring, the thing my character swore it would never do. all technically in the window, all functionally ignored.

what helped wasnt a bigger context, it was re-anchoring salience on a cadence. two things did most of the work for me.

first, a short authors-note style injection that carries only the CURRENT stakes. one or two lines, present tense, what matters right now, refreshed every ~20 messages. not the whole history.

second, when i summarize i summarize the emotional state and the open threads, not the plot beats. the plot it can reconstruct on its own. the weight it cant.

to be upfront, i work on an rp app (storychat), so im in this problem professionally. but none of the above needs it, its just what held in my own long chats. anyone landed somewhere different, or getting salience to hold another way (rag, lorebook depth, manual re-injection). whats your setup

https://preview.redd.it/yyfq4zrd0yah1.png?width=390&format=png&auto=webp&s=6d6f477c60cc2d189d4bc58cd40a18b6b255826c

https://preview.redd.it/2958azrd0yah1.png?width=466&format=png&auto=webp&s=0b6bc5d31788711238b27e2147ca5544ad134b9b

https://preview.redd.it/zw32nzrd0yah1.png?width=466&format=png&auto=webp&s=f524c6d203eab8120bc1dfc2729ce3c4bc595a44

you're three hours into a scene and your character forgets the thing that happened that same morning in-story. or you built something good, tuned it for a week, and it comes out flat because it runs on the same tiny shared memory cap as every other bot on the platform. those two are the same problem wearing two masks, and we're done shipping it.

so that shared cap is no longer the only setting. here's what actually changed, one thing at a time, because we'd rather you explain it back to a friend than take our word for it.

first, there's a memory dial now, and you hold it. turn it up and your character remembers a lot more than the flat cap everyone is stuck sharing today. you set the ceiling, we don't. this is the main thing here. if you take nothing else from this post, take that one: how much your character carries is a knob in your hands now, and it goes way up.

second, you can run different models. a range of ours, or connect your own. a heavier, stronger model spends your usage faster than a light one. so you pick the model per character, per what the scene needs. a throwaway side character does not need the expensive brain. your main one might. how the dial and each model draw down usage is the job of the part of the team that builds it, but the choosing is yours.

third, what a subscription actually is here. a plan gives you a usage balance that refills every week. inside that weekly balance, everything you do is free. read that twice, it's the part people trip on. the plan is not a meter ticking against you the whole time you play. it comes back each week, and normal use lives inside it. that's why using storychat the way you use it now still feels free.

fourth, for when you run past that balance, or when you just never want a subscription at all. you can keep going with SP, which is our usage credit. SP charges you only for what you actually used, not a flat monthly fee for a month you barely touched. and before you send an action, you see the estimate first, so nothing gets spent behind your back.

fifth, if you'd rather route around us completely, bring your own proxy. connect it in custom proxy mode and we take nothing on our end. you still pay whoever runs your proxy, but from us there's no charge on top.

so the whole shape: dial up for more memory, models spend usage at different rates, a plan gives you a weekly balance that's free to use, SP covers only what you actually use past that, and your own proxy costs you nothing from us.

here's why we went this way instead of stamping "unlimited for everyone" on it. the only way that math works is by quietly grinding every user down to the cheapest shared model and the smallest memory, forever. that flat cap you live with on most platforms is exactly that, a floor dressed up as a gift, and the reason your good character got lobotomized. we didn't want to sell you a fake unlimited that's really a ceiling nobody's allowed to move. a real dial, the actual cost shown before you spend it, normal nights covered by the weekly balance, and a door open for anyone who wants to bring their own proxy and skip our charge. that reads worse as a pitch. it's the truthful one.

if you're now worried your regular nights cost money, they don't. the weekly balance is sized to cover normal use, and it refills. most people playing the way they already play stay inside it and never touch SP. the thing you'll actually notice is reaching for the dial one night and your character suddenly holding the whole scene.

the part we're not happy about, and we'd rather say it out loud than have you find it later: a free weekly balance only means anything if we keep it worth having. the quiet way this kind of thing goes bad is the balance getting smaller over time, or the dial getting capped lower, until SP is the only thing that feels good anymore. that's the exact move that burned all of us on the apps we walked away from. we can't hand you a clean promise in a reddit post. what we can do is put it in writing right here, so the day normal use ever gets worse to make the paid path look better, you screenshot this and throw it back at us.

so here's what we actually want back from you, and it's the only ask. does you holding the dial instead of us read as fair, or does it just smell like the nicer-sounding version of a paywall showing up later. tell us where it worries you for the way you actually play, and what this would have to look like for you to trust it. it's still soft enough to move, and the way you play is the only thing that tells us where. tell us where it breaks.

tl;dr for anyone who doesn't want the wall of text:

- there's a memory dial you control now. turn it up and your character remembers way more than the old shared cap. you set the ceiling, not us.

- you pick the model, a range of ours or your own. a stronger model spends your usage faster than a light one.

- a subscription gives you a usage balance that refills every week, and everything inside that weekly balance is free. normal nights stay free like now.

- past that balance, or with no subscription at all, you use SP and only pay for what you actually used, with the price shown before you send.

- bring your own proxy (custom proxy mode) and we charge you nothing on our end.

- the point is you choose your memory and model, instead of everyone getting throttled to one cheap setting so we can slap "unlimited" on the box.

Hey fam, this is Albert, one of the co-founders with Jack on storychat. I saw the unskippable mid-chat ad threads going around this week and i want to put our position in writing where you can hold me to it.

The policy: No ads inside chats. not between messages, not mid-scene, not ever in the place where you're actually with the character. if storychat runs ads at all, they live in one spot, the points top-up page, where you're already in wallet mode and a banner costs you nothing.

Free users keep the full chat experience clean, that's the point of doing it this way. i'm writing this down now, before we're big enough for an ad network to make us an offer, because that's exactly when platforms find reasons to forget what they said. this post is the receipt. if you ever see an ad anywhere near a scene, link this post under it and i'll have to answer for it in my own sub.

Checkout out short video about the Character ai ads situation. We are basically 2 homeless dudes in a starbucks. Not some big corporation lol. We are just 2 super poor guys with a dream together. Cheer us on! We just wanna make you happy!

Hey fam, this is Albert, one of the co-founders with Jack on storychat. I saw the unskippable mid-chat ad threads going around this week and i want to put our position in writing where you can hold me to it.

The policy: No ads inside chats. not between messages, not mid-scene, not ever in the place where you're actually with the character. if storychat runs ads at all, they live in one spot, the points top-up page, where you're already in wallet mode and a banner costs you nothing.

Free users keep the full chat experience clean, that's the point of doing it this way. i'm writing this down now, before we're big enough for an ad network to make us an offer, because that's exactly when platforms find reasons to forget what they said. this post is the receipt. if you ever see an ad anywhere near a scene, link this post under it and i'll have to answer for it in my own sub.

Checkout out short video about the Character ai ads situation. We are basically 2 homeless dudes in a starbucks. Not some big corporation lol. We are just 2 super poor guys with a dream together. Cheer us on! We just wanna make you happy!

https://preview.redd.it/f8iipopf0m6h1.png?width=1622&format=png&auto=webp&s=5e245825633406156a7ee8447079514d971e1917

https://reddit.com/link/1u2stmk/video/oarr1bo00m6h1/player