These version numbers fail to stick because business people with no understanding of the technology keep trying to make it about the content. Going back 15 years ago people tried the term “Web 3.0” first as the semantic web and then some advertising nonsense. Last year it was about some cryptocurrency stupidity.

It’s not about the content. It’s about the experience. Web 2.0 were sites making use of XHR (asynchronous HTTP requests) to send/receive content without refreshing the page. Back in the 2000s this was a massive improvement because the experience was better over slow connections and there weren’t giant frameworks to dick it up. You actually had to know what you were doing and the experience was massively improved.

In that spirit “Web 3.0” will likely be a socket and event driven experience. Now the bottleneck isn’t the transmission but slow applications from poorly trained developers. When the application and the transmission are both fast a web application can perform faster than desktop applications doing everything in 50ms or less in response to user interactions. You aren’t going to achieve that with the overhead of HTTP round trips.