It has been nice, and I appreciate that I have been able to make some money from writing on here. I have also been pushed to write stories much longer than my actual limit, with an audience bigger than my friends or creative writing class. However, I wish it was possible to make a living from writing on this site.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I feel like my stories are crying babies, and if I don't feed them, these ugly, miserable things die.
Everything dies if you don't keep feeding it. That's normal. What's unique about CHYOA is if you DO keep feeding it at regular intervals, it's guaranteed to get time on the front page again. You can't say the same about most other social media websites, where the algorithm does whatever the algorithm's gonna do, and you either float to the top or get buried in obscurity.
That said, CHYOA is a small site. As long as it remains small, at best you'll be a big fish in a small pond. The obvious answer, once you've honed your writing ability and start to feel confident, might be to move on to a bigger site, or even a more lucrative medium. Text games on Steam, perhaps. Or maybe Visual Novels. Ebooks. Whatever.
As I say this, I realize that this might be part of the problem-- writers moving on to greener pastures as soon as they start to become seasoned. I've noticed some people occasionally plugging their other accounts, and running accounts across multiple adult fiction sites simultaneously might in fact be the best approach. But of course, it's more work to maintain, and all creatives eventually settle on a platform and neglect the rest of their babies, as it were.
The other solution would be to link to your CHYOA on other sites, essentially advertising both your work and the platform, and potentially drawing in new users. Generally, though, that's backwards. The smut you write is supposed to be the draw, in the first place-- the top of the funnel. The bottom is wherever online you get paid. Other content, sites, or even mediums won't change this fundamental dynamic, but diversifying your skills and your social media presence might help show you where your true talents, passion or audience lies.
Just keep feeding those babies, though. Without feeding your babies, you have nothing.