Lately, I see more and more texts on the net with bolded words and I was wondering, why do people do that, because it really hinders the “flow” while reading a text (at least for me). Basically, I find it quite annoying…

Is this for search engine optimization? Searching for it seems to prove my first assumption:

Use bold for your heading and summary as this helps to emphasize the importance of this content, and search engines give content that is bolded an extra value.

(from www.gerrymcgovern.com)

Guide the search engines to your key points with bold, strong or emphasis tags within the body of the post

(from www.businessblogconsulting.com)

Bold text is given more weight than ordinary text but not as much as H tags. As much as is reasonable, enclose the search term in bold tags when it appears on the page.

(from www.webworkshop.net)

It sounds more like voodoo to me than that it really can help. And for me personally, I'd rather don't use that “feature” than to annoy my readers with hard to read texts. High rankings are certainly also possible without that technique…