How to remove block from left or right panel in magento 2?

Its almost the very same way

<referenceBlock name="block.name.wantoberemoved" remove="true"/>

Remove compare products from sidebar

<referenceBlock name="catalog.compare.sidebar" remove="true" />

Remove Wishlist from sidebar

<referenceBlock name="wishlist_sidebar" remove="true" />

In Magento 2, you can remove Compare products and Wishlist from sidebar blocks of Category Page through xml. You can remove it by adding a default.xml file to your theme in: theme_dir/Magento_Catalog/layout/default.xml

And add below XML

<page xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="urn:magento:framework:View/Layout/etc/page_configuration.xsd">
 <body>
    <referenceBlock name="catalog.compare.sidebar" remove="true"/>
    <referenceBlock name="sidebar.additional" remove="true"/>
 </body>
</page>

The code works fine in Magento 2.1.1.

With little changes :

instead referenceBlock replace with referenceContainer

<referenceContainer name="block.name.wantoberemoved" remove="true"/>