Well, as far as steemcleaners goes, you can tell if its a bot by reading this post which gives a list of handy frequently asked questions that people have.

You can also tell its not a bot by the amount of actual people on this thread who are a part of steemcleaners telling you its not a bot, that we are just people lol.

Should bots make profit? It depends on the bot- Do you think fighting plagiarism is a worthy cause on steemit? If so, that is cheetahs main function and in order to run it needs to be funded. Do I think the Hive account@iliketoast bot or Hive account@ionlysaymeep need to profit? That's a matter of personal opinion, I mean I like toast but I'm not sure how much of a payout that thing actually warrants.

As far as what set of rules are used? A good starting point would be this post which outlines what we tend to consider abuse.

Obviously there will be disagreement, as community based volunteers we tend to listen to the feedback we are receiving. For example, an early point of contention was people who simply repost a youtube video without any additional text, commentary, etc.. just a straight link to a youtube video being posted dozens of times a day. At first we considered this spam because where is the effort in just reposting dozens of videos? What does it add? But it became clear that people were really pushing back against this so we let it go now.

Lately the issue seems to be mainly over affiliate and referral links with people split on what is acceptable and when does it become spam.