Yes, that's my point. It's another market, and while markets have a lot of utility they also tend towards bimodal distributions which disproportionately reward a very successful and visible participants while disproportionately exploiting a much larger group. A pure market system has higher entropy than one which features some redistribution.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/0001432.pdf

If something like this is going to be based on number of stars, imagine how this will turn the current "give us a star on github" to.

I think in France we had some interesting propositions for press funding based on this idea.

Everyone paid a tax each year and gets token that they can attribute to the media they want. The fund are redistributed according to the tokens.

I don't really like the idea of an automated measurement of merit / popularity. Let users decide and choose few projects they want to sponsor each year. Maybe show the current number of sponsor so big projects don't get all the votes.