Made a scroll bar buddy that walks down the page when you scroll

Overall reaction & vibe

• Many commenters found the scroll buddy charming, funny, and reminiscent of the “old web” (Geocities/DHTML/Xeyes/Bonsai Buddy–style whimsy).
• Several people said they normally hate sites that mess with scrollbars, but made an exception here because it feels playful and well executed.
• Others strongly disliked it, calling it distracting and unpleasant, and said they would immediately leave any serious site that used this.

Ideas for alternative “buddies”

• Long list of suggestions: car, train handcar, rowboat, skier, scuba diver, climber, monkey/cat on a pole, penguin, slinky, bookworm, rocket/UFO/bird, squirrel, hamster with parachute/jetpack, raindrop race, Newton’s apple, Sisyphus, elevator, Michael Jackson moonwalk, dancing GIFs, etc.
• Some propose game-like or contextual versions: Breakout or Pong with the scrollbar, buddy reacting at headings, picking up breadcrumb trails, or tying into a minimap.

Behavior & UX improvements

• Frequent request: have the character turn around or moonwalk when scrolling up; direction currently feels visually wrong to some.
• Suggestions to vary animation with scroll speed (walk vs run), stop/reset when idle, or invert movement on mobile to match finger motion.
• A few want to grab the buddy itself to scroll, restoring some functionality of classic scrollbars.
• Some see it as highlighting how modern scrollbars have become thin, hard to grab, and less informative.

Accessibility, compatibility & discoverability

• Strong consensus that prefers-reduced-motion should disable the animation; the demo adopted this, but then many users with that setting saw “nothing” and were confused.
• Multiple people argued the demo page should show a message when reduced motion hides the buddy, or allow an override.
• Others reported issues with Dark Reader/dark mode (character invisible on dark background) and some browsers/devices (especially Firefox/Android).
• Debugging in comments often traced missing animation to OS/browser “reduce motion” or theme settings.

Implementation, sharing & licensing

• Some criticized gating implementation instructions behind an email-collecting Google Form; others defended it as a fair “payment” in attention.
• Commenters extracted and shared gists of the code, adapted it (e.g., Mario sliding down a flagpole, hamster demo), or made small patches (turn-around-on-upscroll).
• There was discussion that, without an explicit license, code reuse is legally unclear.