Honestly, a friend asked me how to use the long/short ratio, so I used $BTC as an example:
The overall long/short account ratio is 1.31, meaning 56.6% are long and 43.4% are short.
A ratio above 1 means more traders are going long, while a ratio below 1 means more are going short. But most importantly, the more extreme the ratio, the more wary you should be of a move in the opposite direction.