The comment complains that the article provides nothing new and is feeding the rebase-vs-merge holy war. I would disagree with that, and it suggests to me the commenter didn't read the article. It's usually considered bad form to make comments on the headline without reading the article. This article in particular steers clear of all the holy war aspects of the rebase-vs-merge debate. I didn't downvote, but I speculate that's why it got downvoted.
In the HN FAQ is a link to guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
One of which is "Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." which is why you'll rarely see discussions about downvotes, and why usually speculation is all you get. ;)