Do petitions work?

My whole life people have been asking me to sign petitions. Stupid peices of paper with a cause written at the top and a gazilion little lines beneath it for people to sign. Well of course now a days in the new modern lazy boy era, pettiotns have changed to forward this email to all your friends(lamest one by far, how on EARTH do you track that thing, stupid garbage chain e-mail should be devoured by the monster comp)or on facebook you join those little apps or groups to say "oi! Change back facebook" (never happens) even twitter "Follow this person to join this cause" yadda yadda yadda.

But seeing all these petitions and groups and people to follow gets me thinking do petitions even really work. I mean I remember all the different groups I was asked to join when facebook made its first 'improvement' and everyone went all in an uproar going no! We want the old facebook back, they never did gete the old facebook back. Personally I got on facebook, didn't notice a thing til everyone started complaining and went oooh yeah thats whats different, then also began to join the complainers.

I mean I know I've heard before with the olden day sign this slip of paper, for a cause I don't know what and if we get blah blah blah amount of signatures we can have such and such changed. I don't even know if any of them worked! I was too laxzy to follow up.

So my question to you is do petitions really work? I'm being serious, genuine curiostiy here folks, I dunno whats what or who's who or why they provide 50 lines when they need a hundred signatures. Anyway so yeah, really do they work?