(particularly related to question/answer sites such as this)
Quite often people want to ask "How do I/you... ?"
Maybe to be less personal or to have a generic title, "How to... ?" is chosen instead. To me this feels quite jarring/incorrect (discussed here: Is a question beginning with "How to" grammatically correct?). Why is this wording so common?
"How does one... ?" might be more appropriate, but could be regarded as too formal or pompous. Is Is there another, better way to ask?
How do you ..? is in fact pretty generic. Of course 'you' could be specific = the addressee, but often it is generic in the manner of French 'on' or German 'man'
Then there is How do we..? which as a generic asks how something is done within a group of people that both you and I belong to, eg. how something is done within the company we both work for.
[Edited section on How do we]
To answer your question
Why is this wording so common?
It is a simple instance of ellipsis when the context makes everything clear. English is filled with this sort of thing.
It is a [fashionable?] mutation of language that will either die off, trundle along as a regionalism or evolve to become accepted or slang or a sociolect, etc.
Is there another, better way to ask?
"How do you [do this]?" Where the "you" is the generic "you".
Be aware: English is not my mother tongue. Check English Language Learners Stack Exchange Can “How to” be a question? for more, I only try to wrap it up here in my own words.
This "How to"-question thingy is a bit like:
To be, or not to be, that is the question.
Well, is this a question? No, not really. It is a logical setup, something you weigh up in your mind, something you turn around and check.
Now check instead:
How to survive? That is the question.
This might still work. But only in a strange embedding like this. A comment says that even
How to survive?
on its own might be right if the reader can see that it is a non-sentential fragment (the question mark marking an associated question rather than an interrogative sentence).
Still, what you are asking for is a setting of giving something a shortened and more generic wording. Then you should write "How to ..." without a question mark at the end, thus, not as a question, to be on the safe side, even though it is a question that needs to be answered. This should at least work on Stack Exchange since nobody would think that the question is just a "How To" guide that already knows the steps. Writing "How to ...?" can be wrong unless you ask yourself or have some other strange setting as shown above. Better stay on the safe side.
On Stack Exchange, this means: in the question header, you can write "How to ..." without a question mark at the end. And if you then take this up in the body again, you should make it a full question (= interrogative sentence): "How can/do I ...?"
