In my experience with the stackexchange network, the format best supports questions that give a situation, actual behavior and desired behavior with the question being how to obtain desired behavior.
I see the same thing on this site. Looking at the highest voted questions, I see:
What to do if you are accidentally following someone?: Actual behavior: walking near people makes them nervous. Desired behavior: walk near people without causing tension.
How do I tell my new boyfriend that I make a lot of money?: Actual behavior: Boyfriend doesn't know how much money I make and it causes stress. Desired behavior: Tell my boyfriend I make more money without pushing him away.
...
However, I've seen a lot of comments and some meta posts talking about how 'How can I convince someone to do X' are bad questions.
Where is the line drawn with that type of question? To me, it seems almost any question on this site can be boiled down to some form of "here's my [actual behavior], how do I achieve [desired behavior]?" Which, since the questions are about interacting with other people, seem to become "How can I cause this behavior in some other person" which to me feels the same as 'How can I convince someone to do X.'
What is the difference between 'How can I convince someone to do X' questions and the questions this community supports? What are some hallmarks of the 'convince' questions that should be avoided (compared to their supported counterparts)?
NOTE: my question is different from Do we need to re-write "How can I get X to do Y" questions? in that I'm not asking how to "fix" a question of this form but rather how to avoid it altogether in the first place.