Should answers be in first person or second person?

Question

On most other Stack Exchange sites, answers are in second person. For example, if you ask a question of the form "Can I...?", your answer will be of the form "Yes/no, you can/can't, because you...." But on this site, I've seen some people answering these questions in the form "I can/can't do that, because I...." These people are often not the same person who asked the question, so I'm not really sure where the "I" is coming from or who it's meant to refer to.

(Not linking to examples because I have no desire to invoke the meta effect against these people.)

I find this style of answer confusing and hard to read. Should we edit them? Or is this an acceptable answer format that we should keep?

Obviously I'm not suggesting we blindly replace every instance of "I" with "you." This would need to be done manually and selectively by humans. In particular, we would need to exclude constructions like "Suppose I want to do X, then I need to..." which are not at all confusing and therefore not the subject of this question.

Answer 1

Should we edit them?

No. According to the help center, you should edit:

• to fix grammatical or spelling mistakes
• to clarify the meaning of a post without changing it
• to correct minor mistakes or add addendums / updates as the post ages
• to add related resources or hyperlinks

It's not a grammatical mistake to use a different perspective than is used elsewhere; it may be slightly odd, but it's still valid in the majority of cases.

This style is often preceded by something like "Suppose I want to do X...", in which case using I for the subsequent conclusion is not only valid, but the only grammatically correct solution.

In general, you are welcome to write answers using any sensible perspective you like, but you should generally avoid editing others' answers to make their style conform to your own.

Answer 2

I reckon I am one of the offenders there. I have for a while consistently answered using the first person. If you feel this is weird, I can very much change my style to you rather than I.