@Olga: That's a tougher question… I admit it started as any other paragraph for my italki notebook—just to practice my target language. Then, for every idea I closed, two more popped up. So I kept writing and re-writing for days. I shared it privately with a couple of Brazilian friends who thought I should post it. So I did. A couple of days later, a girl contacted me and confessed having gone through a harassment situation similar to the one I describe on the essay. She said she wished I had posted it before. And that was the turning point. It no longer was a "writing exercise". I put a couple of extra weeks into it to bring awareness to the online language learning community—especially for the newbies.

As for you not having enough confidence to post your articles, I'd say forget about the confidence thing. If you have something to say, I'm sure there's people here who want to read it. You become more confident by doing that thing that scares you.

@Olga: Thank you for reading (: First of all, my essay is not a critique against any site in particular. The behavior of the users is outside of the control of the webmasters.

As for your questions:

The aim of the essay is to make the reader think and come up with his/her own conclusions based on his/her own experience. To trigger that process of instrospection, that's the goal.

It's mainly descriptive, rather than prescriptive. I just lay down the ideas, I don't tell you what to do. Writing about the best way to navigate these issues would take a whole new essay.

My first draft contained more details about my experience, but it was about 7 pages long… and let's be honest, nobody was going to read that. So far, less than a third of the people who click on this discussion, follow the link to the essay itself. And from those, less than 8%, actually read it.

@Moa: Thanks for following my posts.

I read the Portuguese version and I found it kinda hard to understand (Portuguese is not my native language). I think you could have used less fancy vocabulary. I'm tempted to read this one too, just to make sure I understood the ideas correctly. I can't say I agree with everything but it was definitely thought-provoking. Thanks for sharing *_*

@Penthesilea: Thank you so much for taking the time to read and ponder on this issue. At first it might seem this type of knowledge could harm our relationships, but maybe in the long run it strengthens them because we stop having unreal expectations—and we stop wearing masks all the time.