What are the benefits to online dating vs meeting people on your own?
-Allows introverts with poor social skills to enter the dating market at a pace they are comfortable with without shitting themselves.
-Helps people who are kind of weird find similarly like-minded people, who are rare.
-Helps gay people find other gay people without needed to awkwardly ask everyone they run accross that they find attractive what their sexual orientation is, on the 5% chance that it is the correct one.
-Allows fat/ugly people to feel desireable by posting misleading pictures, which is something they cannot do in real life as their fattness will be obvious to all who behold them.
-Allows you to stalk someone's interests and viewpoints to give you a greater sense of confidence going into a date if you are a person with poor social skills/confidence.
-Allows you to filter potential hook-ups specifically by their claimed sexual attributes. For example, if you wanted to, you could search through potential matches and specifically look to see if they would be down with bondage or a rape fantasy or not before you expend any effort on them.