TLDR;

Since this answer has drawn some attention, I’ve just developed an npm package based on it to allow everyone to use it as an independent package/library in their projects. Therefore if you want something to work with right away, you can add it to your project:

Demo

npm i @smakss/react-scroll-direction
or
yarn add @smakss/react-scroll-direction

Read more here.

The answer and its description

This is because you defined a useEffect() without any dependencies, so your useEffect() will only run once, and it never calls handleNavigation() on y changes. To fix this, you need to add y to your dependency array to tell your useEffect() to run whenever the y value changes. Then it would be best if you had another change to take effect in your code, where you are trying to initialize your y with window.scrollY, so you should do this in your useState() like:

const [y, setY] = useState(window.scrollY);

useEffect(() => {
  window.addEventListener("scroll", (e) => handleNavigation(e));

  return () => { // return a cleanup function to unregister our function since it's going to run multiple times
    window.removeEventListener("scroll", (e) => handleNavigation(e));
  };
}, [y]);

If, for some reason, window was unavailable there or you don’t want to do it here, you can do it in two separate useEffect()s.

So your useEffect() should be like this:

useEffect(() => {
  setY(window.scrollY);
}, []);

useEffect(() => {
  window.addEventListener("scroll", (e) => handleNavigation(e));

  return () => { // return a cleanup function to unregister our function since its gonna run multiple times
    window.removeEventListener("scroll", (e) => handleNavigation(e));
  };
}, [y]);

UPDATE (Working Solutions)

After implementing this solution on my own. I found out some notes should be applied to this solution. So since the handleNavigation() will change y value directly, we can ignore the y as our dependency and then add handleNavigation() as a dependency to our useEffect(), then due to this change we should optimize handleNavigation(), so we should use useCallback() for it. Then the final result will be something like this:

const [y, setY] = useState(window.scrollY);

const handleNavigation = useCallback(
  e => {
    const window = e.currentTarget;
    if (y > window.scrollY) {
      console.log("scrolling up");
    } else if (y < window.scrollY) {
      console.log("scrolling down");
    }
    setY(window.scrollY);
  }, [y]
);

useEffect(() => {
  setY(window.scrollY);
  window.addEventListener("scroll", handleNavigation);

  return () => {
    window.removeEventListener("scroll", handleNavigation);
  };
}, [handleNavigation]);

After a comment from @RezaSam, I noticed a teeny tiny mistake in the memoized version. Where I call handleNavigation within another arrow function, I found out (via the browser dev tool, event listeners tab) that each component rerender will register a new event to the window, so it might ruin the whole thing.

Working demo:

---

Final Optimized Solution

After all, I ended up that memoization, in this case, will help us to register a single event, to recognize scroll direction, but it is not fully optimized in printing the consoles because we are consoling inside the handleNavigation function and there is no other way around to print the desired consoles in the current implementation.

So, I realized there is a better way of storing the last page scroll position each time we want to check a new status. Also, to get rid of a vast amount of consoling scrolling up and scrolling down, we should define a threshold (Use debounce approach) to trigger the scroll event change. So I just searched through the web a bit and ended up with this gist, which was very useful. Then with the inspiration of it, I implement a simpler version.

This is how it looks:

const [scrollDir, setScrollDir] = useState("scrolling down");

useEffect(() => {
  const threshold = 0;
  let lastScrollY = window.pageYOffset;
  let ticking = false;

  const updateScrollDir = () => {
    const scrollY = window.pageYOffset;

    if (Math.abs(scrollY - lastScrollY) < threshold) {
      ticking = false;
      return;
    }
    setScrollDir(scrollY > lastScrollY ? "scrolling down" : "scrolling up");
    lastScrollY = scrollY > 0 ? scrollY : 0;
    ticking = false;
  };

  const onScroll = () => {
    if (!ticking) {
      window.requestAnimationFrame(updateScrollDir);
      ticking = true;
    }
  };

  window.addEventListener("scroll", onScroll);
  console.log(scrollDir);

  return () => window.removeEventListener("scroll", onScroll);
}, [scrollDir]);

How it works?

I will go from top to bottom and explain each code block.

• So I just defined a threshold point with the initial value of 0; then, whenever the scroll goes up or down, it will make a new calculation. You can increase it if you don’t want to immediately calculate a new page offset.

• Then, instead of scrollY, I decide to use pageYOffset, which is more reliable in cross-browsing.

• In the updateScrollDir function, we will check if the threshold is met; then, if it is completed, I will specify the scroll direction based on the current and previous page offset.

• The most crucial part of it is the onScroll function. I just used requestAnimationFrame to make sure that we are calculating the new offset after the page got rendered wholly after scrolling. And then, with the ticking flag, we will ensure we are just running our event listener callback once in each requestAnimationFrame.

• At last, we defined our listener and our cleanup function.

• Then, the scrollDir state will contain the actual scroll direction.

Working demo: