I don't feel sorry at all for commercial grifters, but there's also genuine publishers. Institutes that just want to share a message and get it out to the public, as a service. That model is now quite broken.
When Zuckerberg talks about Twitter not fulfilling completely its role as a text based social network, I would like to remind him that the biggest social network in the world is the global e-mail network not Facebook and yea e-mail is primarily textual. E-mail as a protocol is powerful but features around it are very much stuck in time. Facebook started like Zuckerberg described it as "a directory of people" and then he built around that concept adding features to connect with other people in that directory and share content. But the problem with Facebook is; it's a walled garden and if you are not in it, you are completely out of touch with other people. On the other hand virtually all people who use internet have an e-mail account and e-mail being an open protocol you can connect with anybody without much hassle.
When people think about text-based social networks, they need to think again about e-mail and how we can improve e-mail experience and build more powerful features around it and not invent new protocols which are barely getting any foothold.