I think user's shouldn't have any ability to impact any other user. I'm not arguing that I have a right to see their posts, as I believe it's the owner/moderators right to deny me that privilege any time they see fit. Instead I'm arguing that you as a user shouldn't have the right to deny me the privilege of seeing anything on a public forum style website.
Further, you don't actually have the means of preventing me from seeing your posts. All you actually have is the ability to prevent me from seeing your posts while I'm logged in under my username. So what you are actually arguing for is just the ability to inconvenience me. That's quite eye-opening.
No, what I am arguing for is a perfectly normal block function. You can log out and view my posts if you’re weird or angry or whatever enough to do so, but you can’t @, quote, or otherwise interact, and you have to go out of your way to a degree that the vast majority of people just aren’t going to do in order to see my activity. That part of blocking is working fine. It doesn’t have to be perfect to work.
It seems that you don't understand what force is. If you are barring my entry, you are using force to keep me from entering.
No, Locked doors aren’t force, unless they keep someone in without heir consent. Circumventing such a door is force.
If I leave rather than enter your house as I tried to do, you forced me to go away.
No, I barred one of many options. I would only have forced you to go away if I had used physical force, the threat of same, threat of police force, etc to make you specifically leave. Tangentially, I’d be within my rights to do so in the actual case of you being at the door to my home and refusing to leave when asked, but no metaphor is perfect. Even then, force doesn’t come into play until I go further than barring your way.
But Internet forums aren’t like real life spaces in some important ways. For one, in real life, if I find Bob obnoxious, and I ask Bob to leave me alone, all normal people in the world know that Bob should just leave me alone. Trying to stand near me so he can hear what I say, and then have a conversation with the people around me about what I say while technically not talking to me would incredibly creepy, invasive, and if a Bob persisted in that after being asked to stop, force might very well come into play. But using the social contract and general social norms to stop Bob from interacting with me isn’t a use of force, obviously.
Online, social cues break down. Half the time people don’t even look at user names while reading posts, and memories are short, so even with all parties acting in good faith, a request to leave me alone is rarely going to work on an Internet forum.
And frankly, I’ve blocked people on this website before because I found them creepy, or because their argumentative style was completely and consistently dishonest, disruptive, and abusive while staying within the technical boundaries of the rules, etc. I don’t expect the mods to ban everyone who is dishonest or creepy. The block function is right there.
The ignore function wasn’t doing its job. Morris, IIRC, talked about it when he announced the change.
I get that it has bugs, and that you hate it, but the idea that it’s an example of force is just patently absurd nonsense.