This is a retrograde step for sites that need quotes to be differentiated from text.

While i agree that there is a need to differentiate spoilers and quotes, and the light grey for spoilers works quite well to do this, removing the yellow background from quotes makes them less clear and much harder to differentiate when reading a question and answer.

Sites like RPG Stackexchange have questions and answers that need to quote rules text from the game systems they are discussing. Having that rules text highlighted both distinctly and differently to the regular text is important, as it clarifies what text is in the author of the post's "voice" and what text is from the game system itself.

For example, this snippet from a recent answer on RPG Stackexchange:

The quoted text is from the rulebook for a specific game. It's point is to backup the answer, but be distinct from the answer text. When reading this answer, the quoted section is now less clear than it would have been yesterday that it is different to the rest of the answer.

Github and Slack are mentioned as examples of prior art in this respect, but those sites have a different focus to stackexchange.

Slack allows for instantaneous messages between colleagues. The messages it is optimised for are therefore short and ethereal. They are also being exchanged between people who are intimately familiar with the message content, since they are communicating about their work and livelihoods. There isn't as much need for a particular slack message to be revisited once a relatively short time period has passed. On Stackexchange however, questions and answers are expected to have a long life, and how they are presented is significantly more important.

Similarly, Github is a site primarily focused on code, specifically repositories of different collections of code. Comments on the code within those repositories are (usually) focused on a specific change made at a specific time. They are similarly ethereal. In addition, these comments do not need the same level of differentiation between quotes and comment text, as the audience reading them are going to be experts on the specific code repository being commented on and the specific topic being discussed. This is not the case on stackexchange. Here we expect the answerers to be experts, but the readers of those answers will generally be non-experts, looking for an answer given by the experts. Thus having strong differentiation between quoted and non-quoted text is important here.

This is a retrograde step for sites that need quotes to be differentiated from text.

While I agree that there is a need to differentiate spoilers and quotes, and the light grey for spoilers works quite well to do this, removing the yellow background from quotes makes them less clear and much harder to differentiate when reading a question and answer.

Sites like RPG Stackexchange have questions and answers that need to quote rules text from the game systems they are discussing. Having that rules text highlighted both distinctly and differently to the regular text is important, as it clarifies what text is in the author of the post's "voice" and what text is from the game system itself.

For example, this snippet from a recent answer on RPG Stackexchange:

The quoted text is from the rulebook for a specific game. It's point is to backup the answer, but be distinct from the answer text. When reading this answer, the quoted section is now less clear than it would have been yesterday that it is different to the rest of the answer.

Github and Slack are mentioned as examples of prior art in this respect, but those sites have a different focus to stackexchange.

Slack allows for instantaneous messages between colleagues. The messages it is optimised for are therefore short and ethereal. They are also being exchanged between people who are intimately familiar with the message content, since they are communicating about their work and livelihoods. There isn't as much need for a particular slack message to be revisited once a relatively short time period has passed. On Stackexchange however, questions and answers are expected to have a long life, and how they are presented is significantly more important.

Similarly, Github is a site primarily focused on code, specifically repositories of different collections of code. Comments on the code within those repositories are (usually) focused on a specific change made at a specific time. They are similarly ethereal. In addition, these comments do not need the same level of differentiation between quotes and comment text, as the audience reading them are going to be experts on the specific code repository being commented on and the specific topic being discussed. This is not the case on stackexchange. Here we expect the answerers to be experts, but the readers of those answers will generally be non-experts, looking for an answer given by the experts. Thus having strong differentiation between quoted and non-quoted text is important here.

If having the transparent background is felt to be important, then some other measure should be used to indicate that the text is quoted. For example, in news articles and academic texts, quotes are quite deeply indented (and sometimes formatted with a different font):

Increasing the indentation on the quote formatting would go a long way to giving the differentiation that is needed. This may, however, run into issues with right-to-left typed languages that the solid background colour did not.

This is a retrograde step for sites that need quotes to be differentiated from text.

While i agree that there is a need to differentiate spoilers and quotes, and the light grey for spoilers works quite well to do this, removing the yellow background from quotes makes them less clear and much harder to differentiate when reading a question and answer.

Sites like RPG Stackexchange have questions and answers that need to quote rules text from the game systems they are discussing. Having that rules text highlighted both distinctly and differently to the regular text is important, as it clarifies what text is in the author of the post's "voice" and what text is from the game system itself.

For example, this snippet from a recent answer on RPG Stackexchange:

The quoted text is from the rulebook for a specific game. It's point is to backup the answer, but be distinct from the answer text. When reading this answer, the quoted section is now less clear than it would have been yesterday that it is different to the rest of the answer.

This is a retrograde step for sites that need quotes to be differentiated from text.

While i agree that there is a need to differentiate spoilers and quotes, and the light grey for spoilers works quite well to do this, removing the yellow background from quotes makes them less clear and much harder to differentiate when reading a question and answer.

Sites like RPG Stackexchange have questions and answers that need to quote rules text from the game systems they are discussing. Having that rules text highlighted both distinctly and differently to the regular text is important, as it clarifies what text is in the author of the post's "voice" and what text is from the game system itself.

For example, this snippet from a recent answer on RPG Stackexchange:

The quoted text is from the rulebook for a specific game. It's point is to backup the answer, but be distinct from the answer text. When reading this answer, the quoted section is now less clear than it would have been yesterday that it is different to the rest of the answer.

Github and Slack are mentioned as examples of prior art in this respect, but those sites have a different focus to stackexchange.

Slack allows for instantaneous messages between colleagues. The messages it is optimised for are therefore short and ethereal. They are also being exchanged between people who are intimately familiar with the message content, since they are communicating about their work and livelihoods. There isn't as much need for a particular slack message to be revisited once a relatively short time period has passed. On Stackexchange however, questions and answers are expected to have a long life, and how they are presented is significantly more important.

Similarly, Github is a site primarily focused on code, specifically repositories of different collections of code. Comments on the code within those repositories are (usually) focused on a specific change made at a specific time. They are similarly ethereal. In addition, these comments do not need the same level of differentiation between quotes and comment text, as the audience reading them are going to be experts on the specific code repository being commented on and the specific topic being discussed. This is not the case on stackexchange. Here we expect the answerers to be experts, but the readers of those answers will generally be non-experts, looking for an answer given by the experts. Thus having strong differentiation between quoted and non-quoted text is important here.