Buy support is the sum of buy orders in USD equivalent from top 20 exchanges (planning to include more in future). It shows the actual amount that people want to buy.
One might say that it's easy to place a large buy order at very low price & increase buy support artificially. However, because of low price, the increase will be negligible.
What do you think? Tell us in comments.
Based on that I am a bit skeptical towards trusting buy and sell orders as showing what amounts and prices people actually want to buy and sell at.
I would like to see someone gather and analyze data to show orders placed vs orders retracted and orders filled. But even the insight gained from that could be of little or limited use.
The metric is useful for comparison - since the arbitrage bots work on all altcoins, their activity is included in the metric for all altcoins.
As for manipulative orders - you're right, they flash in the orderbook on and off. However, when I needed to exit, I actually filled a couple of them - so they were real.