The next big scheme is allready in the making - virtual customers:

You order a shoebox appartment, create a home-maker NN that can fake basic human occupancy, register it online as a new citizen and put it on basic income, and set it up to order stuff from company A. Now those NN trade among one another, sending the stuff in a circle until its scrap or they are broke and its impounded.

Finally, the limiting part for eternal growth can be removed.

Don't VCs constantly fund things (social media or otherwise) that never reach profitability? Isn't that the whole gamble of "venture" funding in the first place?

The monetization aspect is supposedly solved. If I suspect you can garner audience, I posit that said audience can be translated into ad dollars at some point in the future. Only the first part is speculative. And speculation is what venture funding is all about.

What most investors fund is something that creates value, and then convert that value to cash later. Creating value is the hard part.

It's not always about a company's profitability either. Startups focus on exponentially growing their assets rather than cash flow then selling it all to someone else. Like Facebook can make more wealth from WhatsApp than they could do by themselves.

Of course, profitability is often close to the actual value something creates. Twitter is a really odd case in that it's a big part of many people's lives, but they won't pay for it.

There's always the option to simply not invest. For those platforms still in a pre-IPO state, you probably can't invest, even if you want to. For Twitter, it's easy enough to not buy the stock, and, indeed, if you bought in Jan 2014, you probably wish you hadn't. But if you bought yesterday, you're probably happy enough right now.

And what's crazier is that this is one of the unicorns and they're still bleeding cash esp. from a company lifetime perspective.