Having worked at a fairly prominent social media company, that is not why social media platforms have block functionality. Mute, functionality, yes, absolutely.
Blocking is typically a much stronger remedy, aimed at curtailing targeted harassment.
Blocking is typically a much stronger remedy, aimed at curtailing targeted harassment.
In what other public, online discussion forum format can anybody without admin powers, arbitrarily and unilaterally ban others from publicly replying to public posts? That idea sounds insane to me.
It would be like if IRC's /ignore function prevented someone from sending messages containing your name – weird. You should be able to block yourself off from anybody you wish, and live in whatever bubble you wish, but not to control others' public speech. The platform has admins who can theoretically deal with law-breaking behavior like harassment or threats or CSAM, and if they choose not to, the platform sucks and I recommend you ditch it. coughtwittercough.
Regardless of all your other arguments here, the change being made to twitter here does nothing to prevent that. Blocking a user still prevents them from interacting with your posts in any way. Now they can just see the post without being able to reply to it. So I'm not exactly sure what your point is.
I mean, Facebook and Twitter have both worked this way for years. Arguably that constitutes most of social media for the last decade.