has anyone tried the italki website for either teaching or learning? Is it worthwhile?

Alkanadi:has anyone tried the italki website for either teaching or learning? Is it worthwhile?

I tried the iTalki website a long time ago for my Russian. It's a useful tool for networking, but I found that, for me, the website was just slow and frustrating to use. Plus, it's essentially a tool to advertise paid tutors. And there's nothing wrong with that, I just had no interest in paying for a tutor.

If you want to find a paid instructor, iTalki can be cool, but so too can platforms like Google Helpouts - there are a lot of language instructors on there, though I don't think there are any in Esperanto.

My experience is that I had more fun (and spent zero money) networking on Google+. You can probably do the same thing on Facebook, but I refuse to use the service because I don't like being "locked" into Facebook and have to see their ads on everything.