Seems natural to me, but I had an iPod when they were still a thing so I might be biased.

Clockwise is “ascending”. Scrolling down is ascending alphabetically by default in a file manager, or ascending through paragraphs in a web site or PDF.

It’s ironic that your graphic of time is ascending in a downward direction, but you didn’t understand this.

The circular scrolling thing has never worked right for me. I set it to “vertical swipe”.

What I would really like is for the left pad to do panning, like a two-finger trackpad scroll. No notches, just a smooth scroll please.

Scrollbar goes down = items on screen go up. What’s so hard about this?

Because the scrollbar is on the right side. So you’re “pushing” it down with the rotation.

I also hate the default setting.

I changed it to uh, left thumpad moves the mouse, left thumbpad click is middle click, remap the right pad to be 4 way buttons, top and left to left click, bottom and right to right click.

Moved scroll to L2 and R2, or you could map them to up and down on a joycon, or the dpad, or L1 and R1, etc.

This is common on Linux even with scroll wheels and trackpads. “Natural” or “Inverted” scrolling is weirdly the default on KDE, GNOME, etc. I turn that shit off.

I think of it as you’re “dragging” the page in the direction you’re scrolling as if you were putting your finger on it and moving it that way. I don’t like the inversion of that.

I think even a normal scroll wheel goes in different directions between both Windows and Mac.

You’re comparing apples and oranges. Volume is a value without implying any kind of progress. Time is progress, and turning clockwise gets you further down the progress of time. A scroll bar going up is something visually going up, but it’s not a value, and it’s not a measure of progress going forward. If anything, it’s going back, because you usually start at the top of a list or page that requires a scroll bar. So progress here would be scrolling down.

But I think any interface should make this sort of behaviour easy to configure.

Turn clockwise = page number go up

That’s how I’d make sense of it.

If you twisted a gear connected with a physical scrollbar clockwise, the scrollbar would move down. So think of the touchpad like a gear. Pretty on-theme with Steam lol.

The scroll bar is on the right so this is intuitive to me.

Don’t think of it mimicking a scroll wheel, think of it mimicking a knob. The right side of the knob goes down when turning clockwise. If the scroll bar was on the left it would correspond to the left side of the knob and clockwise would be up (or at least should be).

I know not everyone would find this intuitive. My wife and I both bought the same make of car twice in a row (before wireless car play and android auto so we used the native ui) and the new ones moved the scroll bar on the infotainment from the left to the right, making clockwise change from up to down. I adapted in a day because it was obvious that moving a slightly curved bar on the right is clockwise for down but it frustrated my wife for several months until she got used to it.

Edit: also volume generally goes left to right which tracks with the top of the knob for me so clockwise is up.

This feels like a joke, but…

All three pictures in the right column go higher by going down the page/list, even the examples, themselves. It’s the exact same. Numerically (count) higher and down on the page.

Volume up and time forward both represent forward progress, which corresponds to down while scrolling.

It’s intuitive to me - clockwise is forward, and if I’m looking at a list or reading a document then down is forward. If I roll a mouse-wheel down in my right hand it’s also moving clockwise relative to me sitting in the middle of my two hands and looking to my right. If I was left handed it’d be counter-clockwise I guess.

I don’t see clockwise as the direction “up” I see it as forward/progress, and forward depends on where I’m going.