It's Find-a-Grave, an indie genealogy site that was acquired by Ancestry, which itself was acquired by Blackstone sometime in the last decade. Blackstone brought in an ex-Facebook executive to run it, and this was one of the results.

Right so the premise here is that somewhere high atop 345 Park Avenue a Blackstone executive is twirling his mustache while saying "gamify the gravesites". Seems implausible. Ancestry was not a good company to begin with (you know what organization really does a good job of this, by the way? The Latter Day Saints), and this is fully on brand for them.

> somewhere high atop 345 Park Avenue a Blackstone executive is twirling his mustache while saying "gamify the gravesites".

I don't think so.

It's more like "hit the numbers no matter what, we don't care what you do to hit them." They hire managers that are ruthless about following through. IMHO this style of ownership is more likely to lead to otherwise avoidable situations involving lax security, teenaged slaughterhouse workers, and trophy hunters on genealogy sites.

>Blackstone brought in a Facebook executive to run its genealogy business, and gamified Find A Grave for engagement/revenue purposes

Well yeah, pretty much?

My problem here isn't Blackstone (unless we're talking about housing, where anti-Blackstone slopulism will set me off, because I'm a housing activist, IDGAF about PE), it's that people have a weirdly high opinion of pre-change-of-control Ancestry.com. Ancestry is terrible! This is all highly on brand for Ancestry, the Experts Exchange of geneology.