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I see a lot of commenting guidelines by authors trying to encourage reader engagement, so I'd like to provide my own:
- Follow any requests made by the author beforehand.
That's it. That's the only rule.
Any website with a public commenting feature is an open space. It's a wild west where the only law is the site's own regulations -- and like the wild west, it's actually a pretty great place if we all work together. Beyond that, each individual person needs to define what they're comfortable with, because everyone has different things they like and dislike. And that's okay! There are no universal standards that all authors uniformly like or hate. The only thing that's close to universal is that authors posting their work publicly want engagement of some kind, and if they don't, it's easy to disable or ignore all comments.
That means if in doubt, do point out that typo, do give that criticism, do make that comment. Respect what the author says, but don't assume they hate something without them saying so. If you make a comment in good faith and it turns out it's not what the author was interested in, that's unfortunate, but it's not your fault. Don't let it discourage you.