>Yeah, shadowbans suck. On the other hand, some people will just keep creating new accounts over and over every time they are told that their account has been banned.

Any online forum will just become full of crap without moderation. So moderation is a necessity. And shadowbans are a sometimes-efffective tool of moderation.

How then, to prevent abuse of power? One possibility would be to allow multiple competing groups of moderators on the same forum and everyone allowed to sign up fro whichever moderation group(s) they prefer. Then if the "official" moderators start behaving unreasonably, people will simply vote with their feet and use different ones.