I don't go quite that far. It's not that I won't moderate if I don't want to offer any opinions. But if I think something will be particularly contentious between me and one or more other panelists, I don't want to also be the moderator in that situation--particularly if I think it's an important issue rather than a trivial one. "Oh, A and I always have a brief spat because they don't want me bringing up surrealism on fantasy panels": annoying but not going to deeply hurt anybody in the audience. Other topics: vary.
I have also been on a panel where it took the combined conscious, deliberate efforts of myself and another panelist to make any conversational space for the third panelist against Steve Brust, who kept interrupting her. Not that he didn't keep interrupting us too, but we had grown inured to him and would tell him to cut it out, and she had some expectations of professional behavior from other adults. (Before the last two months I would have refrained from naming that particular name, and I won't drag the other two parties into it without checking that they are willing, but: here we are, really, I see no reason not to.)
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Date: 2017-08-09 01:56 am (UTC)I have also been on a panel where it took the combined conscious, deliberate efforts of myself and another panelist to make any conversational space for the third panelist against Steve Brust, who kept interrupting her. Not that he didn't keep interrupting us too, but we had grown inured to him and would tell him to cut it out, and she had some expectations of professional behavior from other adults. (Before the last two months I would have refrained from naming that particular name, and I won't drag the other two parties into it without checking that they are willing, but: here we are, really, I see no reason not to.)