[Scaless]

Let's actually look at where it's being used.

html metadata - once in a <title> tag, once <meta name=title>, another in a <meta property=og:title>, another in a <meta name="twitter:title">. Probably some duplication for compatibility and different platforms.

2 times in <link rel=alternate> tags, for alternate versions of the site.

Actual displayed title below the video.

Suggested playlist mix - twice, one is the html tag 'title' and the other is the tag content.

Once for a title over the top of the video if the player is embedded in an iframe.

Once in a minified blob of javascript.

Basically all of these are ok use cases for duplicating data in the HTML. It's not excessive at all and I would have actually expected much more.

I don't know why the existence of metadata is a shock to the author.

[jchw]

There seems to be some disbelief that it needs to be repeated so many times. I agree though, this seems totally within expectations and I am kind of surprised to see this on HN frontpage. It’d be more interesting if the post did the basic legwork of analyzing each usage, but it does not seem to...

[Izkata]

My assumption upon seeing the title but before reading anything else was along the lines of, "request" means "browse to the video page" and "downloads" refers to separate ajax calls. Something like that would certainly qualify as interesting...

[martyvis]

Exactly. I really thought the blog author was implying there 14 GET requests rather than the title just appearing as a meta data through the page.

[CydeWeys]

Also, we need controls. How many times does the page title appear inside the page in other websites? Is 14 even unusual or is that average? The methodology here is so sloppy, and the result could have been much more interesting.

[judge2020]

You can also watch the network then search for the title and nothing shows up (but the network tab does search response bodies, eg. search for 'gapless'), so it really isn't being duplicated more times than it needs to.