It may be a matter of a development mistake or it could be that Google is on the verge of a drop over a very serious precipice: merging G+ and YouTube and forcing users to have G+ accounts in order to upvote videos.

Last night, well-known science fiction actor Wil Wheaton—who played Westly Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation—posted with some fury on Tumblr that he’d been pricked by Google+ when he tried to upvote a video on YouTube.

Needless to say, he was somewhat heated over this usurpation of his social sovereignty,

Oh, go fuck yourself, Google. This is just as bad as companies forcing me to “like” something on Facebook before I can view whatever it is they want me to “like.”

Just let me thumbs up something, without forcing me to “upgrade” to G+, you dickheads.

Today, Wheaton has developed  a calmer and well spoken case against what Google might be doing with G+ on Gizmodo,

Yesterday, I tried to like a video on YouTube. I wasn’t signed in to my Google Plus account, and this is what I saw:

Where the thumbs up and thumbs down used to be, there is now a big G+ Like button. When you go anywhere near it, you get a little popup that tells you to “upgrade to Google plus” for some reason that I don’t remember, because the instant I saw it, I made a rageface.

I haven’t seen this happen myself (and it hasn’t happened to me personally) but more anecdotes about this are beginning to crop up that I’m not about to dismiss its appearance. Someone at Google or YouTube is letting a stampede of bugs into the general population and the result isn’t pretty.

Since the advent of Google+ we’ve been seeing Google try to tie together as many of their holdings as possible. They’ve been doing spring cleaning, killing old labs, merging others, they swept away Google Wave, and dropped many of the social features within Google Reader. As Google has acquired YouTube some time ago, it isn’t entirely unexpected that they might try to hook it into G+ in some fashion.

This is not how to do it.

Certainly there are huge benefits to integrating Google+ and YouTube, such as being able to easily share YouTube videos via the social platform and allow comments to intermingle. The more places that I can get my videos viewed and allow discussion, the better. However, YouTube itself is also its own social microcosm, the website runs a great deal of promotions, features, and acts as a testbed for indie producers, and citizen journalism.

Google would be better off keeping the upvote-downvote system of YouTube and adding a “Share on G+” toggle the way that they integrate Facebook and Twitter already.

As Wheaton goes on, it’s that microcosm community that YouTube has built up that a produces the landscape for developers, producers, video makers, and others to get known and become part of promotions and networks. Stripping that out and inputting the G+ social networking instead will rip out the innards of the civilized petri-dish that YouTube has been for quite some time. It will not just upset the natural order; but it will dissolve and neutralize all the hard work done by celebrities and hard working indie developers on the video site.

I fall in behind John Green, who reblogged Wheaton’s message last night,

I strongly agree with this. Making it so that only google plus users can decide whether a YouTube video is worth watching benefits no one except for Google Plus: It is bad for viewers, bad for video creators, and bad for YouTube’s ability to curate and tailor videos to potential viewers.

We’re better off having Google+ benefit YouTube, the video makers and viewers, rather than bolstering the social media at their expense.