I actually am glad that get got rid of language partner search. My female friends (and a lot of my female teachers) on italki hated the harassment and they felt it made italki like a social dating site. As someone in the technology industry, I can understand why they dropped it and changed the way of users interacting to follow/follower like Instagram. If there's someone I think would be a good language partner match, I can simply follow that person. If that person follows me back, we can message each other. It filters out all those random friend requests which was really off putting honestly.

I totally agree with you! Offering language exchange for those who might not be able to afford lessons is great and keeps language learning accessible for everyone. And I love having everything I need from a language learning community/website all in one place, but now with the changes, we don't. I've always used both the paid and free exchanges with italki since I first started. I'm truly disappointed they got rid of that feature. Surely it'll be bad for business. What about all the people who come to the site for the free aspect, and then as they get further along they decide to also start paid lessons?

That's partly true, I've been missing the language partner feature since changes were set. On the other hand it's also true that italki sometimes ended up being a kind of tinder. Nevertheless, I think every single community on earth will be prone to develop that type of behavior in fact it's hard to keep under control. People will be leaving their comments as if it were the old message box either way.

I agree with you. Not more useful