Do governments actually listened to signed petitions?

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Whenever people ask me to sign a petition I never want to actually bother to do it, because the government's never going to read those or comply with those. If they have an agenda, they are not going to let anything change their mind. Petitions that have been signed by a lot of people before, haven't done any good. The government didn't comply. And makes people think they will?

Is it just too wishful of thinking, or do they actually help, and I am wrong?

^ I know that here in the UK if a petition to parliament meets a certain number of signatures, then they are required to debate it.
At various points in our history there have been shenanigans to prevent the submission of petitions they don’t want to debate.
Of course “Parliament debates” does not mean “government acts”.
They are however not required to even so much as formally notice petitions that fail to meet the minimum required number of signatures, nor petitions to any body other than parliament, including state institutions: so a petition to the health minister, for example, would not be debated because it has the wrong addressee.

^I think the US has a similar system if the petitions are filed through the White House website.

It doesn't go to Congress, but IIRC, the WH has to at least acknowledge the petition if the signature amount hits a certain threshold.

Here's a recent UK petition that had little effect.

Close Schools/Colleges down for an appropriate amount of time amidst COVID19.
681,384 signatures

Stop schools being closed unnecessarily over fears of coronavirus (Covid-19)
769 signatures

It’s quite an old right: in times past petitions were carried into the Palace of Westminster on big rolls (think synagogue copy of the Torah, but bigger still) with honour guards and music.
The last famous petition to Parliament that was ignored without debate was the Luddite one... that resulted in several years of terrorist activity on the part of the aggrieved petitioners. They even assassinated the Prime Minister
(Spencer Percival).

Oh okay. I live in Canada, and not one petition signed has met any action out of all they asked me to sign. Even if they debated it, what good is a petition, if they are not required to act?

Mostly letting them know what options there are for enhancing their popularity and thus career,
should they be worried about that.
We did have a petition with the last few years over treatment of kids with cystic fibrosis that got a change in policy.

Did a double check, current UK situation is:
• Minimum 100,000 signatures,
• Discussed by Petitions Comittee of the Commons,
• If they recommend, which they do in about 60% of cases, debates by the Commons.
• Outcome depends on the nature and course of the debate.

It's been my observation that on-line petitions are not worth the paper upon which they could have been written, and that hard-copy petitions are oh-so-conveniently lost in the bureaucracy when it comes time to debate them.

Oh why are they not worth the paper they have been written on?

Yeah that's true, so why is it that people even bother writing up petitions and getting so many people to sign them, if a government will not take them seriously?

Oh okay. Well the last petition I was asked to sign was for China to shut down it's wet markets, so there are no more virus outbreaks, but would China even bother to do that, even if it's signed a lot, and has been properly filed?

Yeah, UK Parliament only recognises online petitions done through their website: and that requires proof of UK citizenship to create or sign a petition.
Change.org etc can be accessed by pretty much anyone in the world with a phone line and a pc, so who’s to tell if all the signatures are citizens of the state in question?